If you are not testing all of your surveys for how they function on mobile, you absolutely should be. Almost half of respondents in our most recent U.S. census-rep survey completed the survey on mobile devices. This included 30% who completed it on phones, and 17% who completed it on tablets. Here is a quick…
Sometimes technology moves so fast it solves a problem before we solve it in other ways. Such is the case with grid-type questions and mobile surveys. People are doing surveys on mobile devices all the time now, so researchers are finally re-thinking how to design surveys. Getting rid of grids has been one mantra of…
A perennial problem with open-ended survey questions is that respondents are lazy. It takes time and effort to think of good answers. And if the survey is self-administered online or on paper, it takes time and effort to write them out. But there are several things a savvy researcher can do. One of them is…
One of the cardinal sins of market research is to misrepresent the purpose of research and how it will be used. The colorful terms used for two of the most common forms for misrepresentation are SUGGING and FRUGGING. The first of these stands for Selling Under the Guise of research. The nefarious “research” firm calls…
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…
It used to be that online surveys were dismissed as a form of polling because only a fraction of the U.S. population had access to the Internet. That is no longer the case, and I was surprised by the latest numbers showing just how extensive Internet access has become. Almost nine out of ten (87%)…
By which we really mean How to Label Your 11-Point Scale because you shouldn’t be using 10-point scales. Plenty of research shows that numeric scales going from 1 to 10 (ten points) are less effective than numeric scales going from 0 to 10 (eleven points). A recently published article in Survey Practice adds more evidence…
Survey invitations are like elevator pitches. You’ve got 30 seconds (or fewer) to grab attention and convince a reader that it’s worth investing time to take your survey. Survey response rates are declining, but there are easy ways to cut through the clutter and boost your own. Here is a before-and-after example of a survey…
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…
Just last week a client proposed having their salespeople recruit customers to take the loyalty and satisfaction survey we had launched for them. It’s a terrible idea, for exactly the reasons that Dagwood realizes with his baffled look in this cartoon. If you want honest feedback that your business unit can honestly use to improve,…