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…
Here’s a useful way to think about statistical significance. When looking at your data, what’s the probability that it looks like something is there, when in fact nothing is there. Randomness in data (because of sampling) often causes illusions. So testing for significance is all about measuring whether the patterns we see in our data…
Getting research used is one of the toughest challenges market research professionals face. And we all agree (at least I hope we do) that it’s the most important part of what we do. It matters that the internal consumers of our work are actually using it. That we’ve turned data into stories that are understood.…
One critique sometimes heard about NPS scores is that they can’t be stat tested. That is not true. Though I know of no statistical packages that do it automatically, it is an easy calculation you can do on your own. Here’s the math: n = sample size a = % promoters b = % passives…
As more and more people use smartphones and mobile devices to fill out surveys, basic survey design decisions need to be revisited again and again. How should surveys be laid out visually? How should answer scales be constructed? How should people be recruited to take surveys? Some of the latest answers to these questions come…
Back in July we published our newsletter on How to Make Spectacular Infographics, and it became an instant favorite among our colleagues and customers. Then in October, Quirk’s e-newsletter published a version of the article, and in just three months it became one of their most-viewed articles of 2014! It is good to know that…
Every day I get a digest of new posts from R-Bloggers, a community of 555+ bloggers who are devoted to using R and sharing what they learn with others. Even though you can’t learn how to use R by reading these posts, once you’ve jumped into the world of R with an in-depth tutorial or…