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Category Archives: Data Collection

Survey Respondents Are Not Strategists

Survey Respondents Are Not Strategists

Data Collection, Survey DesignBy Joe HopperDecember 19, 2018

So why are we asking them to do our jobs? I ask this question a lot when we execute surveys for marketing and business strategists. They’re smart people who want us to synthesize lots of data into compelling stories for their business clients. They love to assemble data into dashboards, visualizations, and grids. But they…

Yes You Can Launch Surveys over Holidays

Yes You Can Launch Surveys over Holidays

Data CollectionBy Joe HopperDecember 5, 2018

For some reason, nearly everybody in research believes that holidays are a bad time to ask people if they will participate in research. I am reminded of this because at Versta Research we have some big studies that launched just before Thanksgiving, and we have some big ones coming up just before and during the…

Don't Waste Your Money Boosting Response Rates for blog

Don’t Waste Your Money Boosting Response Rates

Data Collection, SamplingBy Joe HopperNovember 28, 2018

Extremely careful researchers work hard to make sure their surveys reach broad and representative samples of their target populations. This usually involves multiple attempts to reach out via multiple phone calls, e-mails, or letters of request. Since statistical models of inference presume 100% response rates within random samples, the goal is always to get response…

Response Rates for Phone Surveys Plummet to 1%

Response Rates for Phone Surveys Plummet to 1%

Data Collection, Public Polling, SamplingBy Joe HopperOctober 10, 2018

In just the last thirty-five years, response rates for telephone surveys have been plummeting. In the 1980s, response rates of 70% or higher were common for well-designed and carefully executed phone surveys. They decreased into the 60% range in the 1990s. And then by the end of the decade, response rates of 30% to 40%…

Nine Ways to Rescue a Failing Phone Survey

Nine Ways to Rescue a Failing Phone Survey

Data Collection, Public PollingBy Joe HopperSeptember 19, 2018

Believe it or not, there are still plenty of phone surveys being done out there, especially for local needs assessments and evaluation surveys. Often these surveys are mandated by state or local governments to ensure that the right services are reaching people who need them. But phone surveys are extremely difficult to field anymore, as…

The Strange Survival of the Focus Group

The Strange Survival of the Focus Group

Data Collection, Focus Groups & QualitativeBy Joe HopperSeptember 5, 2018

The Economist ran an article a few weeks ago from which I have borrowed the title of this post. It puzzles over British politicians railing against focus groups for message testing and trying to understand voter sentiment, while continuing to rely on them as heavily as ever. “In an era when voters are monitored, tracked…

Beware Bad Sample from Crowdsourcing

Beware Bad Sample from Crowdsourcing

Data Collection, Public Polling, SamplingBy Joe HopperAugust 29, 2018

Oddly enough, the researchers who most prize scientific rigor (our research colleagues in academia) are the last to have realized that online sampling can be treacherous. An article published in Wired magazine last week describes academic psychologists as “freaking out” because they just learned that a lot of their data, which they source from Amazon’s…

What Makes A Survey Scientific?

What Makes a Survey Scientific?

Data Analysis & Analytics, Data Collection, Methods & Tools, Public Polling, Sampling, Survey DesignBy Joe HopperAugust 22, 2018

Surveys run the gamut from silly to serious, and from sloppy to scientific. Occasionally we do something silly if a client insists (though we generally advise against it). But we never do sloppy surveys, and we hope you never do them either. Lean as far as possible towards rigor and science within reasonable constraints of…

Easy Surveys Generate Tons of Errors

Easy Surveys Generate Tons of Errors

Data Collection, Survey Design, Survey TipsBy Joe HopperAugust 15, 2018

There is a “user-friendly” feature that some survey platforms now offer, and almost certainly you should avoid it. It is called auto-advance. I had an unpleasant encounter with it in a customer survey I just took. The idea is that, after clicking on an answer, instead of having to move a mouse or finger all…

Surveys on Cell Phones Are Just as Good

Surveys on Cell Phones Are Just as Good

Data Collection, Survey DesignBy Joe HopperAugust 8, 2018

If you worry that cell phones make it harder to get high quality, thoughtful, and richly detailed data with surveys, stop worrying. New research from a trio of survey measurement scientists (one at the Census Bureau and two at University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center) shows there are no differences in data quality and measurement…

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