During a presidential election year there is no escaping the flurry of public opinion polling and the intense scrutiny that surveys get from the media. But love it or hate it, there are excellent reasons to pay close attention to this year’s political polling.
The first lesson I learned in one of my graduate-level research methods class was surprising and simple: You need variation in your data if you want to do statistical analysis. In other words, you cannot identify the causes, predictors, or so-called “drivers” of an outcome unless you have a whole variety of different outcomes in…
If you ever have trouble convincing your managers and executives about the value of market research, tell them this: The one billion dollar settlement that Samsung will pay Apple for patent infringement was based on a carefully designed market research study using conjoint analysis. According to colleagues at Sawtooth Software, a company that develops the…
When all of the hype and uncertainty around social media settles down, market researchers will likely see it as “merely” another useful channel through which to gather data and opinions from the audiences they care about, just like surveys, focus groups, or ethnographies. In the meantime it is good fun to read articles, like this…
A couple weeks ago we presented new data showing that response rates continue to decline. You can now expect that a typical, rigorously executed phone survey will yield a response rate in the single digits. Scientific evidence over the last decade has shown that high response rates do not necessarily yield more accurate surveys. In…
A colleague at the University of Chicago is planning to teach a summer course on survey methods in North Korea. He asked a large group of researchers who belong to AAPOR (the American Association of Public Opinion Research) for recommendations on 10 books to bring that he could leave in the library. We get similar…
Cost matters when you choose a sample or panel provider for your survey because there are good panels and bad panels. Bad panels provide survey respondents at cheap prices. But they do a lousy job managing and screening their members. Not surprisingly, a good portion of the data you get from bad panels will likely…
Bad data is worse than no data. With no data, at least you have intuition and experience to rely on. Bad data, on the other hand, will result in “findings” that are likely to spoil important decisions. With most surveys fielded online nowadays, we have lost the opportunity for phone (or in-person) interviewers to assess…
How do you make a beautiful, elegant, intuitive, and useful chart showing changes in market share over time? In R. That always seems to be the answer these days when it comes to data visualization as well as data analysis. It is the reason that we at Versta Research are in the midst of…
Most people who take surveys want to share their opinions, which is important for researchers hoping to get a few nuggets of data from willing respondents. The trouble is, if a survey it not written carefully, a respondent’s urgent desire to share their feelings may bias their answers to other questions. Two marketing professors at…