It is hard to resist the temptation of asking “just one more question” when you’ve got an engaged respondent answering your survey questions online or on the phone. But it is crucial to do so because plenty of research shows that longer surveys result in bad data. Survey respondents may be willing to answer just…
Many of us in marketing research have been deploying web surveys for over ten years, and web surveys are, by far, the dominant mode of data collection in our industry nowadays. But our techniques and methods are an amalgam of practices adapted from other data collection modes, learned in part through trial and error, and…
In Versta Research’s Winter 2011 Newsletter, published just this week, we describe a simple method for estimating how long it will take respondents to complete surveys. Here we offer the “Versta Digest” version as a handy reference card. Once you get the hang of it, you don’t need the examples and explanation. You just need…
Friends often solicit from me quick advice about conducting do-it-yourself customer satisfaction surveys. What questions should they ask? How many questions should they ask? What measures and scales should they use? And, of course, shouldn’t they be using NPS (Net Promoter Score) like everyone else? I tell them that, by far, the most useful question…
MaxDiff is a powerful method and it is increasingly popular among market researchers. But it is not always the best choice for measuring the importance of attributes, and here’s why. Suppose you want to measure the importance of 12 attributes for a new product or service. If you know ahead of time that consumers are…
We have always been big fans of the Net Promoter Score (NPS) metric because it has convinced many firms to begin using customer satisfaction measurement scales that work better and that are tied to what people do rather than what people think. Eleven point scales (with points zero to ten) allow for optimal variation. They…
We are often surprised by the number of senior researchers in the market research industry who never touch raw data. Often they don’t even have the tools, since “data processing” is outsourced to lower levels or other countries. It is surprising because we almost always engage in work where getting into the data and puzzling…
As much as we love numbers, we find ourselves often advising clients against using numeric scales in their surveys. A numeric scale is any response format that asks people to give a number within a certain range to indicate the strength of their feeling or opinion. The insanely popular survey question used to calculate Net…
Among the many sources of potential error that can affect surveys are respondents themselves. They sometimes misinterpret questions, respond in socially acceptable ways, or give “easy” answers in hopes that a more interesting question is just around the corner. This is not to say they are bad or fraudulent respondents. Research shows that the vast…
One resource that we give far too little thought in market research are the people who offer their time and thoughts about the stuff we are researching. They are truly the lifeblood of market research. An article in the spring 2011 issue of Public Opinion Quarterly looks at trends over the last thirty years in…