Willem Saris

Willem Egbert (Wim) Saris (born 8 July 1943) is a Dutch sociologist and Emeritus Professor of Statistics and Methodology especially known for his work on "Causal modelling in nonexperimental research". and on measurement errors (MTMM analyses, development of the SQP program, and of procedures to correct for measurement errors).

Willem E. Saris was born in Leiden, the Netherlands, in 1943. He finished his study of Sociology at the Utrecht University in 1968 and got his PhD degree from the University of Amsterdam in 1979. He became full professor in political science, especially the methodology of the social sciences in 1983. Till 2001, he was working at the University of Amsterdam. In 1984, he created the Sociometric Research Foundation in order to improve social science research by the application of statistics. In 1998, he became member of the methodology group that prepared the start of the European Social Survey (ESS). As a consequence he was also member of the Central Coordinating Team of the ESS from 2000 till 2012.

In 2001, he moved to Barcelona where he got a position as ICREA professor at ESADE. He was also from 2009 to 2012 director of the Research and Expertise Centre for Survey Methodology (RECSM) at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. He was also one of the founders and the first chairman of the European Survey Research Association (ESRA) which turned out a big success.

Saris advised about 25 doctoral students. Among them were Nelly Kalfs (1993), Annette Scherpenzeel (1995), Jack Menke (1996), Gilbert Cijntje (1997), Akos Munnich (1998), Emiel Kaper (1999), Jaap Kamps (2000), Ivar Vermeulen (2002), Robert Voogt (2004), William van der Veld (2006) all at the University of Amsterdam, Christiana Martini (2003) at the University of Padua, Alberto Gimeno and Antoni Dorse (2005), Laura Guillén Ramo (2007), all at ESADE, Barcelona, Daniel Oberski, Tilburg University (2011), and Mélanie Révilla (2012), Wiebke Weber (2013), Paolo Moncagatta (2015), André Pirralha (2016), and Diana Zavala-Rojas (2016) at Pompeu Fabra University.

Over a long period of years Saris was involved with Irmtraud Gallhofer in an applied research project studying political decision making on the basis of minutes of the government or notes of advisors to the government. After developing reliable instruments for analysis, they applied their approach on many different decisions of the Dutch government and mayor decisions in the world history such as decisions concerning the start of the First and Second World War, the Cuba missiles crisis and the use of the atomic bombs in 1945. This study was first of all directed on the argumentation of individual decision makers. In a later phase, the research was extended to the study of collective decision making by the same governmental groups. The striking result was that the decision makers were making so simple arguments with respect to such serious problems of war and peace.

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