During a presidential election year there is no escaping the flurry of public opinion polling and the intense scrutiny that surveys get from the media. But love it or hate it, there are excellent reasons to pay close attention to this year’s political polling.
We love this cartoon because it raises such interesting issues about probability and prediction in market research. Here’s a quiz. Suppose you own a retail store and want us to help predict which customers that come through the door will buy. You want to focus your sales efforts on the best prospects. We do our…
The first lesson I learned in one of my graduate-level research methods class was surprising and simple: You need variation in your data if you want to do statistical analysis. In other words, you cannot identify the causes, predictors, or so-called “drivers” of an outcome unless you have a whole variety of different outcomes in…
If you ever have trouble convincing your managers and executives about the value of market research, tell them this: The one billion dollar settlement that Samsung will pay Apple for patent infringement was based on a carefully designed market research study using conjoint analysis. According to colleagues at Sawtooth Software, a company that develops the…
Way back in 1944, Edwards Deming published an article in the American Sociological Review that could be required reading for anybody who does research today. He outlined all potential (and unfortunately, common) sources of error in survey research. Apparently our contemporary obsession with sample sizes, random samples, response rates, and margins of error is not…
The New York Times Magazine runs a weekly feature called “Who Made That?” It provides a history on the origins of oddities like fly swatters, soy-sauce dispensers, clothespins, Kraft Singles, and … pie charts. They attribute it to one William Playfair, a Scottish engineer who created and published a pie chart in 1801. He is…
When all of the hype and uncertainty around social media settles down, market researchers will likely see it as “merely” another useful channel through which to gather data and opinions from the audiences they care about, just like surveys, focus groups, or ethnographies. In the meantime it is good fun to read articles, like this…
A couple weeks ago we presented new data showing that response rates continue to decline. You can now expect that a typical, rigorously executed phone survey will yield a response rate in the single digits. Scientific evidence over the last decade has shown that high response rates do not necessarily yield more accurate surveys. In…
I’m always inspired by this video from Vi Hart, who describes herself as a “mathemusician.” She doodles and draws, finds numeric patterns and insights as she does it, and weaves interesting (and funny) stories around those insights.
Survey response rates are now staggeringly low—in the single digits. A typical response rate for a relatively high-budget, carefully executed phone survey is merely 9%, down from 36% just fifteen years ago. Here are the numbers from research conducted earlier this year by the Pew Center: If you want to throw money at a survey…