When we talk about human rights we often focus on qualitative narratives; the tales of struggles faced by refugees, of rights denied to individuals during war, of the fight for clean food and water, but undergirding all those stories are statistics. Statistics that allow us to gain insight into the scope of a human rights issue, or the size of a population living through particular human rights abuses. The collection of those statistics is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Jana Asher.

Jana Asher is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Slippery Rock University. She is also a Service-Learning Associate of the Office for Community-Engaged Learning at SRU, as well as outside of work, she is a member of the board of directors for the Pittsburgh Interfaith Evolutions Corporation (PIE), a non-profit organization dedicated to spreading interfaith understanding. Her research interests include questionnaire design, survey methods, record linkage, history of statistics, community-engaged education, and statistics education as well as her work with human rights and sexual violence. Within the ASA, she is currently a member of the Committee on International Relations and the Program Chair for the Section on Survey Research Methods.