Versta Research Blog

Versta Research Blog

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Versta Research is a marketing research and public opinion polling firm that helps you answer critical questions with customized research and analytical expertise.

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Versta Research Blog

Explore industry trends, research methods, and tips for your own research projects in the Versta Research Blog. All opinions are our own, and some may change over time.

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A Good Methodology Page Sways (Some) Readers

A Good Methodology Page Sways (Some) Readers

What do you do when faced with a skeptical audience of business executives who are predisposed to disagree with your research findings? It is tempting to leave out the boring methodological details of how your research was conducted, who you interviewed, your assessment of the data’s validity and reliability, and so on (“Toss all that…

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Five Last Steps in Writing a Questionnaire

Five Last Steps in Writing a Questionnaire

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…

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Beware Bad Sample from Crowdsourcing

Beware Bad Sample from Crowdsourcing

Oddly enough, the researchers who most prize scientific rigor (our research colleagues in academia) are the last to have realized that online sampling can be treacherous. An article published in Wired magazine last week describes academic psychologists as “freaking out” because they just learned that a lot of their data, which they source from Amazon’s…

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What Makes A Survey Scientific?

What Makes a Survey Scientific?

Surveys run the gamut from silly to serious, and from sloppy to scientific. Occasionally we do something silly if a client insists (though we generally advise against it). But we never do sloppy surveys, and we hope you never do them either. Lean as far as possible towards rigor and science within reasonable constraints of…

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Easy Surveys Generate Tons of Errors

Easy Surveys Generate Tons of Errors

There is a “user-friendly” feature that some survey platforms now offer, and almost certainly you should avoid it. It is called auto-advance. I had an unpleasant encounter with it in a customer survey I just took. The idea is that, after clicking on an answer, instead of having to move a mouse or finger all…

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