On Monday I received media training from one of the research industry’s top professional organizations: The American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). They hired Brenda Foster, a career journalist and now a communications and PR consultant, to teach research nerds about how to succeed with media interviews when talking about research findings. First she…
Like most researchers who take data visualization seriously, I am not a fan of pie charts. But not too long ago I came across a pair of pie charts that display data in a striking and visually compelling way. Indeed, they tell a story with data better than other alternative types of charts. The story…
If you read our article a few years back ago about COVID-19, you may have noticed some statistics we cited that seemed odd and open to misinterpretation. 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…
It was a long, arduous process (and still is), but it was worth it: Versta Research has been awarded certification for compliance to ISO 27001! This is one of the most widely recognized and internationally accepted information security standards. Certification puts Versta Research among a small handful of market research and insights firms that undergo…
Personas are fictional representations of customer types, but they reflect the demographics, behaviors, goals, and motivations of people derived from real data.
An article in The New Yorker claimed that a hundred years ago most Americans died in their mid-fifties. Alas, they were fooled by a statistic and the claim is not true.
It is magical thinking to believe that charts and graphs and fancy new tools for data visualization will solve the challenge of finding insights in data.
Imagine a class of undergraduate students in business marketing taking their first—maybe their only—marketing research class. What is the toughest part of research for them? After one lecture and an assignment, we asked them, and nobody said math or statistics. We’ve just published the Versta Research Summer Newsletter and our feature article, What Do Gen…
With all the strange business disruptions of the last 16 months, and the ways in which the coronavirus shifted the foundations of market research, July 1 feels a lot more like the beginning of a new year than January 1 did. Life is back to normal, we hope! This “new year” inspires us to take…
One of the biggest challenges Versta Research faced during the first year of COVID-19 was a huge and puzzling spike in the amount of fraud on research panels. We saw many organizations falling victim to this fraud. There were obviously false studies with absurdly sensational headlines being published by the media and in scientific journals.…