The New York Times’ recent brand and marketing campaign is all about Truth. Well, if Truth really matters, then they desperately need a good old fashioned survey to back their flimsy claims in a recent article about how small business owners view the candidates running for president. In a front-page article of the business section…
Whether you’re a seasoned research professional, a newbie, or whether you dabble in research for other job responsibilities (like marketing or strategy) you will probably find something you don’t yet know in our winter newsletter with a feature article on 25 Things You Might Not Know About Research. It covers topics from stats, to charts,…
In our company we nearly always try to keep data collection “anonymous.” This means that for most of our surveys we intentionally do not know the identity of who participates (though our sample providers do). We rarely ask for any type of identifying information, not even a first name. If for some reason we have…
Here is a sly little test I recommend giving the next researcher who offers up their help on your next quantitative survey. Ask if they have ever used a DIY survey tool, and what advice they would give you about sample size based on this selection tool you looked at from one of the largest…
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…
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%…
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…
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…
Nobody gets really good at market research by taking classes. It comes from learning on the job and in the field from other researchers. That is because researchers are always solving new problems and answering new questions that have never been asked before. That inspired us to make our summer newsletter The Big “How To”…
Do you ever feel a little glow of patriotic pride in your research work? At Versta Research we sometimes do. Here’s why: the United States of America gives us and you—all free, and all easily accessible—one of the most amazing, useful resources available to every person and every business and every researcher: Census Data. It…