Whenever we’re involved in global research work, issues of cross-cultural communication are top-of-mind. Whether we rely on translations, or whether we speak the same language as our clients and respondents, it is important for researchers to understand differences in how people think and respond to research questions because data is always context sensitive. For example,…
We saw an ad today for a downloadable survey app that was pitched as a tool for actionable insights. Wow! Download, install, run . . . click again, and there they are, sitting on your desktop or smart phone: actionable insights. Is this possible? No. It unfortunately confuses the tools of market research and public…
An industry colleague (another owner of a market research firm) once said to me, “We all lust after those big tracking studies.” For most market research firms, tracking studies are attractive because they involve big samples, multiple ongoing deliverables, and multi-year commitments, all of which means predictable, ongoing (and sometimes substantial) revenue. At Versta Research,…
At a moment when our industry is scandalized by a panel provider having been indicted for selling fraudulent survey respondents, in comes another provider that is doing nearly the same thing with absolutely full disclosure. The catch? They are using AI to do it, and dressing it up with phrases like “contextually relevant” and “statistically…
A colleague in market research once complained to me that he felt bored and unchallenged by all the client satisfaction and loyalty research he was doing, claiming he had mastered it to the point that he could do satisfaction and loyalty research in his sleep. I was struck because I could not think of any…
Omnibus surveys evolved as a way to share costs by combining survey questions from multiple clients. Because the biggest cost in conducting a survey is getting it set up and then finding a statistically representative sample of respondents to answer the questions, for some surveys it makes sense to pool resources and conduct a larger,…
Asking people to fill out long, tiresome, and boring surveys is a scourge of the research, polling, and survey industry. (Another is asking them to fill out a survey every time they interact with you — see There Are Too Many Surveys.) Asking people to fill out long surveys teaches them to avoid surveys in…
Good research happens by design. That is one of the reasons we enjoy writing research proposals. Writing proposals is an exercise in research design, which is the place and time where you must think in strategic and smart ways about what you are going to do and how you are going to do it. You…
It should be straightforward to ask someone a simple factual question and receive a reliable answer. Questions like: “Do you have children?” “Do you attend church every week?” or “Do you own a bank account?” seem easy and clear-cut. However, the moment we begin drafting even these seemingly straightforward survey questions, we quickly uncover ambiguity…
A truly effective research report is both parsimonious and richly nuanced. In other words, (1) it is short and to the point, and (2) it captures the complexity of reality. But how do you do both? The importance of the first was highlighted some time ago in a NYT “Corner Office” interview with Guy Kawasaki,…