Even the very best survey shops are pressured to do bad work. My recent experience with one bad survey from a fancy survey shop illustrates in multiple ways one of the biggest problems facing market research today: bad surveys via robots, including the newest dreaded incarnation of robots: Artificial Intelligence. The survey came from a…
If you make your survey questions hard, it turns out that people will make a good faith effort to answer them. But they will make mistakes, and you will end up with bad data that lacks reliability and validity. What I find so interesting is that most people will actually try to answer your hard…
Having focused intently over the last several months on best practices for writing surveys (see Five Last Steps in Writing a Questionnaire and How to Write Surveys: 25 Best Practices) I have been paying extra attention to the work of research methodologists who codify best practices and develop protocols for implementing them. One set of…
So why are we asking them to do our jobs? I ask this question a lot when we execute surveys for marketing and business strategists. They’re smart people who want us to synthesize lots of data into compelling stories for their business clients. They love to assemble data into dashboards, visualizations, and grids. But they…
Customizing MaxDiff exercises by piping in text from previous survey answers might seem like a good idea, but analyst beware: if you are estimating individual-level scores using hierarchical Bayes or latent class analysis, you must split the data into subsets before you calculate the scores. Your results will be nonsense otherwise. Here is the scenario…
In our fall newsletter we purposely glossed over the “standard” best practices in writing surveys that one typically reads about in text books or learns in research methods classes. We wanted to give you a deep-dive into our own five last steps in writing a questionnaire that focused on advanced topics like randomization, programming logic,…
In quantitative survey research, the questionnaire affects nearly everything else that is critical to a study: the data, the analysis, and the findings. And because of this, writing surveys is the component of research that requires more on-the-job experience than any other. It requires thinking on multiple levels about all other aspects of the research…
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…
There is a “user-friendly” feature that some survey platforms now offer, and almost certainly you should avoid it. It is called auto-advance. I had an unpleasant encounter with it in a customer survey I just took. The idea is that, after clicking on an answer, instead of having to move a mouse or finger all…
If you worry that cell phones make it harder to get high quality, thoughtful, and richly detailed data with surveys, stop worrying. New research from a trio of survey measurement scientists (one at the Census Bureau and two at University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center) shows there are no differences in data quality and measurement…