When the U.S. Census Bureau started redesigning its race and ethnicity question for the 2020 decennial census, we started revising our own short version for surveys, too. Now we have enough data from one full years-worth of surveying on multiple projects, and we can tell you this: it works really well. We used to have…
It’s not easy to use a survey to measure public knowledge or misperceptions. Why? Because surveys are not quizzes. Respondents expect you to ask questions they can answer truthfully and correctly based on their opinions and experience. As good researchers, we mostly try to reassure respondents: “There are no right or wrong answers! Please give…
Last week we showed you a survey that might convince you to think twice about hiring a super high-end consulting firm for your survey research and insights. Fancy business consultants may know a lot about business, but they know little about gathering good data to answer their business questions. So this week, instead of focusing…
Ever wonder what you get if you hire a fancy schmancy consulting firm for your survey research and marketing insights, instead of Versta Research? Every once in a while we have a potential client who insists: “Give us IBM! Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” I got a view into what those surveys look…
If you suffer from miserably low response rates to surveys you send with your own e-mail list, here’s something to try: Dump the e-mail invitation functionality that is built into your survey platform like Qualtrics. Instead, use a stand-alone email tool like Mail Chimp or Constant Contact. This will make your life harder, and it…
We recently offered an article about needing to “punish test” surveys lest you end up with a mess of mistakes like text piping that fails, or survey layouts that do not to adapt to user devices. But how do you actually punish test a survey? The best way, we think, is to start with a…
Testing a survey before it launches takes about 4 to 6 hours of an experienced professional’s time, for a standard ten- to fifteen-minute survey. If you don’t invest that time up front, you are almost certain to discover mistakes while in the field (or worse: after), which can make for a nightmare of programming corrections…
Contrary to some widely held beliefs that mobile devices are a barrier to survey participation, a majority of survey respondents nowadays fill them out on phones, rather than on desktops, laptops, or tablets. Research has amply documented that the quality and reliability of data collected via mobile devices is comparable to data collected on desktops.…
It is possible now to get thousands of responses to a survey overnight so that you can turn around research results as quickly as your managers and clients want. Would you trust the findings? I hope not. Suppose you want a general population survey that truly represents all U.S. adults. You will need to ensure…
If you read our article a few weeks ago about COVID-19, there were probably several statistics we cited that you (or maybe a colleague) misinterpreted. That’s because instead of reporting the percentage of respondents who did or said something, we reported the mean of all survey respondents’ answers to a numeric scale. We had no…