It is good to use multiple survey questions to measure a particular attitude or opinion, and for many years experts on survey design recommended reversing the wording on some questions to get a stronger and more valid measure. For example, if we want to measure retirement confidence we might ask respondents how much they agree…
This week we published Versta Research’s quarterly newsletter with a feature article entitled “Wisdom in an Age-Old Question.” While it might seem simple to ask a person’s age on a survey, it turns out that there are all sorts of ambiguities and documented sources of error in the various ways you might ask it. Fortunately,…
A mistake often made by both professional and do-it-yourself researchers is letting a survey sit in the field without actively monitoring it. Once we design a survey and put it out there for people to respond, we just wait patiently (or get busy on another project) until we have data for analysis, right? But collecting…
In a typical graduate-level research course on survey methods, students are taught to ask demographic questions about race, ethnicity, age, gender, income, etc. at the end of a survey. The questions are typically off-topic, and they sometimes scare away respondents who feel such questions are intrusive. But with most surveys now fielded through online survey…
Most people who take surveys want to share their opinions, which is important for researchers hoping to get a few nuggets of data from willing respondents. The trouble is, if a survey it not written carefully, a respondent’s urgent desire to share their feelings may bias their answers to other questions. Two marketing professors at…
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…
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…
In response to last week’s newsletter, Is Your Research Good Enough for The New York Times?, which discussed hurdles of getting online survey research reported by some news organizations, a customer reminded us that online surveys can be difficult to sell internally as well. Too many people have been burned by junk data from online…
One of the surprises of multi-mode research is that offering people a choice of how they want to complete a survey (online, by mail, by phone, etc.) does not necessarily boost response rates. An article in the most recent issue of Public Opinion Quarterly provides new evidence of this. The study showed that even in…
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…