An important role for good survey researchers is to translate ridiculous sounding jargon their clients give them into ordinary words that real people use. The jargon is typically business or marketing related, because most surveys are done for business or marketing clients. But I just ran across some “marketing science” jargon (created by market researchers)…
Believe it or not, some people do not find puppies irresistibly adorable, as our newest honorary member of the Versta Research team (pictured here) can tell you. Elio arrived a couple of weeks ago. He is 13 weeks old and truly over-the-top adorable. He mostly sleeps in a crate next to me as I work…
The best way for you to get better survey data is to fix, optimize, and strategize your survey design. How? Abandon rote templates. Give up complexity. Think ahead to your analysis. Above all, put yourself in the shoes of a respondent. We market researchers complain when we get data back from surveys and see that…
What if a survey asks you a question that implies a yes-no answer (“Have you ever …”) but then offers you answer options that are different from what it implied (“often, sometimes, rarely, never”)? New research tells us that it depends on how the survey is administered. If the survey is online or on paper,…
Here is the e-mail subject line to a request I just received from a research company asking me to take a survey: Your Help Is Key to Our Success. I find it hilarious that somebody thinks this is an enticing subject line, as if I care deeply about their success. They really want me to…
Survey questions that have multiple response options with an instruction to “select all that apply” are common in our industry, and for good reasons. They are efficient and easy for respondents to answer. They are efficient to lay out graphically. They shorten the length of a survey in terms of both time and space. The…
The online customer satisfaction survey I received today had me noticing an unfortunate side-effect of the NPS (Net Promoter Score) schema and visual imagery. For those of you unfamiliar with NPS as a way to measure and track customer satisfaction, here is how it goes. In your survey ask: “How likely are to recommend Acme…
There are two things that make me most proud of my company, Versta Research. First is the work that clients pay us to do, because we put so much thought, care, and rigor into delivering the insights they need. Nothing goes out the door without me feeling like we’ve “owned” the work completely, and I…
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…