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Putting together our winter newsletter, Five Free Data Sources Every Market Researcher Should Know, had me reviewing various sources of free data that we use nearly every day at Versta Research. The really big sources were top-of-mind and easy to come up with: data from The Census, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the National Institutes…
If you make your survey questions hard, it turns out that people will make a good faith effort to answer them. But they will make mistakes, and you will end up with bad data that lacks reliability and validity. What I find so interesting is that most people will actually try to answer your hard…
Here is a sly little test I recommend giving the next researcher who offers up their help on your next quantitative survey. Ask if they have ever used a DIY survey tool, and what advice they would give you about sample size based on this selection tool you looked at from one of the largest…
Happy birthday to us! We were born on January 19, 2009 in the depths of a recession with nowhere to go but up. Many of the research firms that were around back then have disappeared, sold themselves off, closed up shop, or consolidated into behemoths. From a statistical standpoint, we beat the odds, which got…
For those who feel far removed from the federal government shutdowns, I hope Versta Research’s winter newsletter will inspire an appreciation for what our government provides that is invaluable (and irreplaceable) in market research. Most researchers have no idea how much free data there is from the U.S. Federal Statistical System. They should, because unlike…
Having focused intently over the last several months on best practices for writing surveys (see Five Last Steps in Writing a Questionnaire and How to Write Surveys: 25 Best Practices) I have been paying extra attention to the work of research methodologists who codify best practices and develop protocols for implementing them. One set of…
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…
A few weeks we wrote about launching surveys over holidays, and we quoted research noting that there is scant evidence for the widespread assumption that holidays periods should be avoided. Lest you now find yourself working over the Christmas holiday trying to squeeze in the last round of data collection getting input from every last…
So why are we asking them to do our jobs? I ask this question a lot when we execute surveys for marketing and business strategists. They’re smart people who want us to synthesize lots of data into compelling stories for their business clients. They love to assemble data into dashboards, visualizations, and grids. But they…
Customizing MaxDiff exercises by piping in text from previous survey answers might seem like a good idea, but analyst beware: if you are estimating individual-level scores using hierarchical Bayes or latent class analysis, you must split the data into subsets before you calculate the scores. Your results will be nonsense otherwise. Here is the scenario…