It is possible now to get thousands of responses to a survey overnight so that you can turn around research results as quickly as your managers and clients want. Would you trust the findings? I hope not. Suppose you want a general population survey that truly represents all U.S. adults. You will need to ensure…
Oddly enough, there are market research consultants who are unaware that they (and you, and anybody in the world) can have direct access to census data files for analysis. We just wrote a newsletter about the value of census data, and about the amazing rigor that goes into validating questions like those on race &…
If demographic benchmarks and trends are essential to your business and the research you conduct (things like age, gender, race, ethnicity, and region) then our just-published 2020 Spring Newsletter has information you absolutely need to know. The U.S. Census Bureau continues to change how it collects and classifies demographic data. Right now the Bureau is…
Market research has made it all the way to the top! It has a seat at the c-suite table just as marketing and research champions have hoped for all these years. According to a recent analysis by The Wall Street Journal, a large number of CEOs now track their company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) obsessively,…
If you crave a deep understanding of why your customers choose one product, concept, or message over another, you might be thinking that deep-dive qualitative research is best. Possibly it is, but you should also be considering a research method at the opposite end of the spectrum: conjoint analysis. Conjoint analysis is one of the…
In basic stats class, all of us learned about the importance of random sampling. It provides the foundation for the iron-clad mathematics of estimation, statistical significance, and margins of error. But the problem in social science, market research, and opinion polling is that random sampling (sometimes referred to as probability sampling) almost never exists. So…
I write a lot about how robots are messing up market research. But yesterday, I had the happy experience of a robot helping us in a surprising a way. It flagged an error in a list of competitive brands for an ATU study (Attitudes, Trial, and Usage)—an error that would invalidated our results if we…
The University of Southern California just released data from a national survey about the Coronavirus. It is an excellent, high quality survey that uses the most rigorous methods available in our industry today. It is worth looking at just for the sake of seeing reliable and truthful numbers about a topic affecting us all. Plus,…
Telling stories is a natural human behavior, but also highly complex and difficult to imitate or automate. This means that, happily, trolls can’t tell stories. And asking survey respondents for an extremely brief story (even just a few words) about their experience related to a survey topic can help you differentiate real respondents from fake…
I don’t know how big the Versta Research blog fan base is, but at the very least, the Quirk’s editors seem to follow us, and sometimes they ask for permission to reprint an article. Such was the case for an article we wrote last month about anonymity in research. The gist of that article was…