Obituary: Statistician Harvey Goldstein

Eminent social statistician and academic Harvey Goldstein, Professor of Social Statistics at the University of Bristol, who was noted for his work on multi-level modelling, died on 9th April after contracting coronavirus. He was 80 years old.

Goldstein (pictured) was born in the Whitechapel district of East London on 30th October 1939, and grew up in Edmonton, North London. At age 11, he moved up to the local grammar, Hendon County School, where he attained top marks for A' levels in pure and applied maths, physics and chemistry; and he then went on to study for a BSc in Pure Mathematics at the University of Manchester. After this, he returned to London to study for a Postgraduate diploma at UCL, during which time he published his first article in Nature magazine, with co-authors including Richard Doll, the scientist who proved the link between lung cancer and smoking.

In 1964, Goldstein took his first lecturing post at the Institute of Child Health (ICH), working on child development studies alongside paediatrician Jim Tanner. At ICH, he also began his long collaboration with Neville Butler, who ran first the 1958 and then the 1970 cohort studies. In 1972, Goldstein took up the post of Senior Research Officer at the National Children's Bureau; and in 1977 he moved to the Institute of Education (IOE), as Professor of Statistical Methods, a post he held until his retirement in 2005. In this role, Weinstein began to work more in social statistics, with a focus on school effectiveness and educational assessment, leading on to his interest in multilevel modelling. While at IOE, he was awarded the Royal Statistical Society's Guy Medal in Silver in 1988, and made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1996.

During this time, he also worked on statistical methodology, software and applications with colleagues in the Centre for Multilevel Modelling (CMM), which he founded and led. After retirement from IOE in 2005, CMM relocated to Bristol, where Goldstein continued in a part-time role as Professor of Social Statistics at the School of Education, University of Bristol until his death. He also served as Professor of Statistics back at UCL Institute of Child Health, and held visiting professorships at University of East Anglia, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the Institute of Fiscal Studies and the Australian Catholic University in Brisbane.

During his career, Weinstein advised many government departments and public bodies, including the Home Office and NHS Digital, as well as the Office for National Statistics and HEFCE. In the 1980s, his research questioned the use of school league tables in education; and more recently he produced an article which appeared in Radical Statistics Journal last summer, debunking the claim that antisemitism is rampant in the Labour Party. He also promoted the statistics discipline through roles at the Royal Statistical Society, most recently as joint Editor of its journal Series A ('Statistics in Society').

With CMM colleagues Bill Browne and the late Jon Rasbash, he supervised the production of the MLwiN statistical software package for fitting multilevel models; and he developed methods for handling missing data values and measurement errors using Bayesian modelling and latent normal transformations. As well as his research contributions covering both the social and medical sciences, he published more than 350 journal articles; and a book, Multilevel Statistical.

George Leckie, who worked with Goldstein on school league tables as a Professor of Social Statistics at the University of Bristol, commented: 'He was great - very unusually approachable for a senior academic, very generous with his time, with very good intuition on tricky research questions. Where some academics might shy away from that, he enjoyed using statistics to challenge policy, to formulate policy. He spanned the social sciences, medical statistics - he could turn his hand to many things'. Jo-Anne Baird, Director of the Department of Education, University of Oxford, added: 'Harvey Goldstein has left an enormous legacy through his own statistics work, through the centre for multilevel modelling and the colleagues whose research careers he supported. He was a friend and will be sadly missed'.

Outside work, Goldstein previously played flute in an orchestra and taught himself French, and he enjoyed cycling in Norfolk with his wife Barbara, was concerned by social inequality and the environment, and had become a vegetarian. He is survived by Barbara and his son, Tom.

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.