A perennial problem with open-ended survey questions is that respondents are lazy. It takes time and effort to think of good answers. And if the survey is self-administered online or on paper, it takes time and effort to write them out. But there are several things a savvy researcher can do. One of them is…
I resist the idea of using Twitter for research because I do not know anyone beyond journalists, PR people, and marketing folks who actually use Twitter. Well, that’s a terrible reason to dismiss a potentially rich source of data, especially because one premise of survey research is that small parts can represent the whole. My…
Having just returned from giving a presentation at the Advertising Research Foundation’s annual conference, Re:Think 2015, I learned that ARF’s “Ground Truth #2” is that brands are built in the brain. As such, the ARF has invested a good deal of time and money over the last decade exploring ways that neuroscience can be applied…
Every year I peruse the listings of summer college training courses on research methods. Part of it is nostalgia—I loved school. But I’m also looking for courses that will keep me and our Versta employees at the forefront of new knowledge and research techniques. (I didn’t learn R in graduate school, so yes, I took…
One of the cardinal sins of market research is to misrepresent the purpose of research and how it will be used. The colorful terms used for two of the most common forms for misrepresentation are SUGGING and FRUGGING. The first of these stands for Selling Under the Guise of research. The nefarious “research” firm calls…
I’m working on a presentation with a research colleague at Wells Fargo for the upcoming ARF (Advertising Research Foundation) Re:Think 2015 conference. The challenge? Getting it streamlined and condensed so that we can deliver the whole thing within a strict timeframe. All the research, all the insights, all the business outcomes from a huge national…
Those of us who do a lot of survey research spend tons of time poring over statistics and reading data tables. And no matter what all the latest clever tools promise, there is no shortcut to reading page after page after page of data or tables or charts, and discerning the patterns or lack thereof.…
Suppose you asked me to bid on a research project, and I told you the cost would be $30,000. It’s an easy, rounded number. Probably too easy and too rounded. You would think “Where did he come up with that? Did he just make it up? Does Versta Research charge $30,000 for every project, even…
An irony of survey researchers’ obsession with high response rates is that higher response rates often hurt data quality. How can that be? It happens because aggressive recruiting boosts the participation of people who provide less reliable information. Two academic articles published in a special issue of Public Opinion Quarterly on “total survey error” nicely…
In Turning Data into Stories we pointed out that numbers have no inherent meaning. There are no essentially big or small or significant numbers, for example—they only become big or small or significant within the context of specific research questions and a range of possible answers. The same is true for p-values by which we…