For every research rule or best practice I proclaim, I find myself doing the opposite eventually. Such is the case with pie charts. I try to avoid them, taking to heart Edward Tufte’s claim that they are dumb and should never be used. Studies show that pie charts do a poor job helping readers grasp…
In the months leading up to this year’s Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality, Wells Fargo worked with Versta Research on a national survey of LGBT Americans. The goal was to understand how changes in marriage laws were affecting decisions about money and marriage. What did we learn about LGBT Americans? Here are two nuggets…
Tomorrow we’re giving a talk at LIMRA’s annual Marketing and Research Conference in Baltimore. The topic? Creating spectacular infographics for market research. It builds upon our Newsletter article from last July, and upon our subsequent top-five article in Quirk’s. And thanks to our own Peter Kowalski, who has extraordinary talent designing infographics for research,…
Venn diagrams are useful conceptual tools, which is why business people love them, and why programs like Word and PowerPoint incorporate them into their suite of “smart art” tools. But as useful as they are conceptually, Venn diagrams are also maddeningly tricky and problematic for data visualization. One reason is that accurate Venn diagrams are…
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…
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.…
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…
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…