[SEE CARTOON] Of course those 99% keep reading the pointless polls, and most research firms are happy to keep generating pointless polls. The problem? Too few research firms are willing and able to help clients differentiate a survey that is informative and truly worthy of print, versus one that is pointless. So how do you…
Communicating statistics is sometimes harder than doing statistics. While statistics is all about formulas and logic and precision, words and sentences are all about communicating layers of meaning that are often ambiguous and nuanced. For this reason we often recommend a quick, online refresher course called “Math for Journalists” for our PR, marketing, and journalism…
Readers of this newsletter and blog know how much we value and respect the New York Times. It is one of the few resources we cite regularly, as it always has relevant, authoritative information that informs our work and that of our clients. So my heart sank when I read this description of a new…
A few weeks ago, The Patient, a peer-reviewed medical journal, published an article based on findings from two surveys conducted by Versta Research. This follows on the heels of a poster presentation last June at the annual meetings of the American Diabetes Association (ADA), and another one just prior to that at meetings sponsored by…
The Associated Press (AP) announced last month it is moving all of its public opinion polling from phone surveys to online surveys. This is progress, because over the last decade AP has been one of a handful of media holdouts (along with ABC News and The New York Times) who have insisted that only phone-based…
The purists in the polling industry who have always insisted that only probability sampling is valid may finally be accepting that their methods are dead. This is one happy conclusion I draw from the debate over AAPOR’s recent task force report on non-probability sampling, which is nicely summarized (and debated) as the lead article of…
PR gets a bad rap in market research. My data wonk colleagues imagine that PR is about spinning, shading, and manipulating the truth. But it is just the opposite, and that is why I love working with PR professionals. To be sure, they are sensitive to the needs, complexities, and politics of the companies they…
The best way to stay fresh, interested, and excited about market research is to read, read, read. It’s the same thing I always told my students in social theory classes. Useful ideas come from those engaged with the world around them who read all kinds of books and articles from a huge variety of sources…
After leaving academic research for the world of applied research, I found myself doing a lot of surveys for public relations. These surveys are designed to uncover surprising or newsworthy nuggets of data that companies use to focus attention on topics relevant to their concerns. My first boss despised such work, believing that a public…
If there is one super important lesson to be learned from this year’s round of election polling, it is that online surveys work. Google Consumer Surveys, which use non-probability online samples, predicted the election far better than Gallup did. And online surveys, overall, outperformed telephone surveys. The New York Times’ Nate Silver compiled polling results…