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…
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…
There’s nothing worse than having your research be a pile of numbers with no obvious story. Or maybe there is. What if every random set of numbers told a story? Or, worse yet, what if our brains could find a story in every random set of numbers, even if a story is not there? There…
You would think that the chancellor of a prestigious school like M.I.T.—a university that prides itself on practical applications of mathematics—would know something about how probabilities work with survey sampling. Apparently not. Quoting a New York Times article about M.I.T.’s survey of students about sexual assault on campus:
A vivid illustration of a statistically spurious relationship is this: People who wear hats tend to drive slower. But there is no causal relationship, as hats don’t cause people to drive slower. It’s just that older people wear hats more than younger people, and older people tend to drive slower. That’s actually kind of interesting,…
I recently came across this strange big book, the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, compiled by the Federal Judicial Center and the National Research Council. It’s not fun reading, but it provides an enormously useful and fascinating overview of what makes social and marketing research (and other kinds of scientific research, too) sufficiently rigorous to…
A persistent misperception in our industry is that technology can (or eventually will) largely automate our work. It reflects a fundamental confusion between the tools that we use versus the work that we do. This confusion was evident in a recent New York Times article about the surprising amount of time that data scientists devote…
I’ve always felt suspicious of consultants who claim to spend the bulk of their time solving business problems and offering insights and, by the way, they also do market research. Then I get a look at their research, and my suspicions are confirmed. So often the data is a MESS—an absolute mess that baffles me…
The next time you analyze the results of your customer satisfaction or brand loyalty tracking study, and you notice an upward or downward shift, ask yourself this: Is it reasonable to think that certain customers—either the happy ones or the unhappy ones—were more willing to give you their opinions than the other group? If so,…