It’s been four years since the AMA convened a panel of thought leaders in market research to ponder questions about how social media fits into research practices and methods. An excerpt of our discussion was published in Marketing News in 2010. Last month, another top industry group (AAPOR) released its Emerging Technologies Task Force report…
For the longest time I was puzzled by what it means to “over-fit” a model to one’s data. How can a model describe one’s data too perfectly? Aren’t we trying to get as close to a perfect fit as possible? This one-minute video will show you an example of over-fitting. After watching it, the odd…
Before the days of DATA MINING this was called DATA DREDGING. And for good reasons, because it was considered not a good thing. Almost any dataset will have nonsense correlations, and if you’ve turned on your magical statistical testing tool at the 95% confidence level, five out of every one hundred nonsense correlations will likely…
Versta Research has just published is spring 2014 newsletter which features a short video on how to do pricing research. If you ever work with price and demand data, and need to figure out the optimal price for your product or service, here are two great tools worth knowing about: 1. PowerPoint (yes, that says…
I just read an online interview with Bob Muenchen, author of R for SAS and SPSS Users. He nicely describes an important aspect of R that I found to be one of the weirdest and most difficult to grasp, but once I “got it,” fell in love. Quoting at length:
Progress bars that show respondents how far along they are in a survey have become standard in our industry. But are progress bars a documented “best practice” for survey research, or just another convention? A recent article in the Social Science Computer Review offers a meta-analysis of 32 field experiments designed to see whether progress…
I’m not sure if this cartoon is funny because I don’t really get it. But it was interesting enough that I started thinking about the null hypothesis, and what it means, and how statistics is changing so quickly that “the null hypothesis” we learned about in our classes may soon feel like an odd artifact…
Every year I offer my top picks for summer intensive training courses on research methods, and usually I point to several universities for the sake of options and a full range of methods. Well, this year I am pointing to just one. I looked at the course listings at the University of Michigan’s Survey Research…
Last week we wrote about the optimal number of benefits, features, or claims you should make in your marketing materials. Research shows that three maximizes the impact because it aligns with a buyer’s sense of data sufficiency. Going beyond three invites skepticism because it reminds buyers that the message is “just marketing,” not information. So…
As we get further along in our careers most of us get further away from the nitty-gritty of data collection, data coding, and sometimes even data analysis. But I always feel nervous about that distance, and usually want to take a quick scan through the raw data myself. I want to see all those rows…