American Institutes for Research

Samantha Neiman is a principal researcher at AIR. Neiman’s work focuses on rigorous development of high-quality measurement tools, large-scale data collections, and data use, with a primary focus on school climate and related topics (conditions for learning, crime and safety, social and emotional skills, character development). She serves as the project director or survey lead for multiple large-scale survey and psychometric projects, where she provides assistance to schools, districts, states, federal agencies, universities, and foundations through projects such as the Nevada School Climate/Social Emotional Learning Survey, the Cleveland Conditions for Learning and Conditions for Teaching surveys, the National Center for Safe Supportive Learning Environments, the Boy Scouts of America Adult Volunteer survey, the School's Out New York City Leadership Survey, and the Thompson Scholars Learning Communities evaluation.

Under contract with the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Neiman also played a key role in the preparation, collection, data processing, and data dissemination for NCES surveys and was extensively involved in editing, imputation, weighting, and bias analyses for national-level surveys. Further, she has been involved in questionnaire development, sampling, data verification and cleaning, and data trainings for NCES. Neiman has authored several NCES reports on school crime and published an article in the Journal of Law and Education titled “Bullying: A State of Affairs.”

In addition, Neiman’s work in an array of topics, including bullying, trends and clusters of school crime, adolescent drug use, issues of survey nonresponse, and school climate survey measurement properties for designing power analyses, has been presented at various national conferences. Neiman received a project management certification from Northwestern University in 2016, and a Record of Specialization in Rasch and Item Response Theory from the Institute for Statistics Education in 2019.