Conscientious and Agreeable Survey Respondents May Be Skewing Your Data

There are three important characteristics of people who “satisfice” on surveys: They are less conscientious They are less agreeable They have different cognitive skills The first two refer to dimensions of the Big Five personality traits. Conscientious people are efficient and organized vs. extravagant or careless. Agreeable people are friendly and compassionate vs. critical and…

Finding Fraud in Public Polls: Our AAPOR Presentation

Finding Fraud in Public Polls: Our AAPOR Presentation

Versta Research is presenting this week at the 76th annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). The conference is being held virtually from May 11 to 14, 2021. The presentation is called Finding Fraud in Public Polls: Employing Semantic Network-Based Methods for Identifying Fraud in Online Sampling. It is a reflection…

The Rigors of Good Research: Three Examples from Thought Leadership

The Rigors of Good Research: Three Examples from Thought Leadership

One of the biggest challenges Versta Research faced during the first year of COVID-19 was a huge and puzzling spike in the amount of fraud on research panels. We saw many organizations falling victim to this fraud. There were obviously false studies with absurdly sensational headlines being published by the media and in scientific journals.…

Forget the Math — For Good Sampling You Need Equality, Inclusion, and Representation.

Forget the Math — For Good Sampling You Need Equality, Inclusion, and Representation

In basic stats class, all of us learned about the importance of random sampling. It provides the foundation for the iron-clad mathematics of estimation, statistical significance, and margins of error. But the problem in social science, market research, and opinion polling is that random sampling (sometimes referred to as probability sampling) almost never exists. So…