Kirsten Becker

Photo of Kirsten Becker
Director, RAND Survey Research Group; Senior Survey Director
Santa Monica Office

Education

M.S. in international health, Harvard University; B.A. in health and society, Brown University

Overview

Kirsten Becker is director of the Survey Research Group and a senior survey director at the RAND Corporation. She has more than 25 years of data collection experience and has been involved in field research both domestically and internationally. At RAND, she has been involved in planning and coordinating both small and large-scale data collection projects in areas of criminal justice, adolescent drug and alcohol use, mental health, drug treatment, HIV and hepatitis, homelessness, welfare reform, and women's health. Her expertise lies in design of complex field data collection, longitudinal follow-up studies, and implementation of multi-modal data collection efforts. She has worked closely with health, mental health, juvenile justice, schools, and social service agencies to establish cooperation and negotiate data collection in such settings. Becker holds an M.S. in international health from Harvard University.

Research Focus

Recent Projects

  • Emergency Department Patient Experience of Care
  • Early Head Start Follow-up Study Tracking
  • Integrated Collaborative Care for Substance Use Disorders in Primary Care Settings
  • A Social Network Analysis of Racial Disparities in Marital Outcomes
  • Project CHOICE

Selected Publications

Becker, Berry, Perlman, and Orr "Finding the Hard to Reach and Keeping Them Engaged in Research," in Edwards, Johnson, Wolter, and Bates, Hard-to-Survey Populations, Cambridge University Press, 2014

Parast, Hays, Elliott, Becker, Lehrman, Stark, Martino, "Development and validation of a patient experience of care survey for emergency departments," Health Services Research, 57(1), 2021

Publications