Harvey Goldstein

Radical statistician who proved the dangers of smoking in pregnancy

IN THE 1970s women first became aware of the dangers of smoking during pregnancy. It followed eight years’ work by statistician Harvey Goldstein at the Institute of Child Health in London. There he collaborated with Neville Butler, who had studied children born in Britain during one week in March, 1958.

Goldstein’s 1977 analysis of various studies into the effects of smoking during pregnancy found a correlation between smoking and prenatal death and the weight and health of newborn babies. Babies born in poverty were also more at risk than those from more advantaged backgrounds.

Goldstein, who has died aged 80 from Covid-19, continued to work on the issue when he joined the National Children’s Bureau, and his legacy changed the behaviour of so many expectant mothers.

Another area of great importance to him was education. He campaigned fervently for more careful examination of assessment data, whose misuse he consistently queried during his years as Professor of Statistical Methods at the Institute of Education, from 1977. The Education Reform Act of 1988, which extended testing to all pupils and led to league tables of school performances, brought assessment to an end, though the new system was also criticised by Goldstein, who pointed out there was a margin of error which often exceeded the differences between the schools’ scores.

Harvey Goldstein was born in Whitechapel, the only child of non-observant Jewish parents, and brought up in Edmonton. When he was five, his mother died of a heart attack and he was left with his grandparents until his father returned from military service during the Second World War. His father’s remarriage, when he was 11, brought him a stepsister, and also an introduction to communism, as both his father and stepmother were passionate communists. He was a member of the Young Communist League until the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1956.

Educated at Hendon County Grammar School, he excelled in mathematics and science and then gained a degree in pure maths at Manchester University. There he met the radical statistician Toby Lewis, under whose influence he came to realise that statistics could help improve lives. After a postgraduate course at University College London, he worked there as research assistant until 1964, when he moved on to the Institute of Child Health.

While at the Institute of Education, he established the Centre for Multilevel Modelling, which was pivotal in advancing the application of statistics to complex problems in the social sciences, particularly education. It has also developed multilevel software.

Goldstein brought out numerous publications and was a member of several organisations, including the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) and the International Statistical Institute. He was also a Fellow of the British Academy and a joint editor of the journal of the RSS. He was awarded the RSS Silver Medal in 1988. In 2005, he was appointed Professor of Social Statistics at the University of Bristol’s School of Education, where he remained until his death.

In addition to his academic work he was a committed activist, who called out the abuse of data in public debate and broadened conceptions of what evidence-informed policy should look like. He gave the 2019 Otto Wolff lecture, Living by the Evidence, at the Institute of Child Health, to celebrate his 80th birthday. It was a heartfelt plea for public policy decisions to be influenced not just by the evidence of research but also by “priorities, feasibility, acceptability and ethics”.

On the political front, having remained a left-leaning rebel since his early communist days, he moved on from supporting Labour to Green politics.

In 1970 he married Barbara Collinge and they had a son, Tom. Listening to music was one of his passions and he encouraged Tom to study the flute. When Tom gave this up, his father took up the instrument, himself and joined a wind band and an orchestra. He also enjoyed cycling and co-authored with Barbara a book of rides, Wheel Around Norfolk, published in 1994. Barbara and Tom survive him.

EMMA KLEIN

Harvey Goldstein: born October 30 1939. Died April 9, 2020