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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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Reflecting a shift in how applied research is being organized and used in businesses today, 2017 marks the end of two important market research industry groups, and the beginning of a new one. Gone is the Council of American Survey Research Organizations (CASRO) founded 37 years ago. Gone is the Marketing Research Association (MRA) founded…
Almost certainly more than you think. If you are purchasing access to survey respondents from panel providers, or from survey software providers, or from any other source beyond your own list (and even then, how carefully are you controlling access to your survey?) you are probably getting fraudulent data from automated bots or from survey-taker…
I hope the recent presidential election didn’t squash your belief that smart researchers can discern patterns in our collective social lives, and that we can make decent (if limited) predictions about what’s to come. Because here we go—Versta Research is going to make a few modest predictions about where market research is headed in 2017.…
Google Analytics is a great example of how powerful OR how utterly useless data can be. If you let your analytics lead you around, and you search and search, and try all those variations and data cuts hoping to land on the “actionable insight” that Google always promises—trust me, you will fail. But if you…
What does it take to be a great market research vendor? That is the animating question behind Quirk’s top-read article in 2016 written by yours truly, your friends at Versta Research. We were thinking about all the annoying things our vendors do to us, and turned them into lessons for what we at Versta believe…
Data wonks have more fun than you may think. If you have not yet begun working with the R statistical program (which is mesmerizing, extremely powerful, hard to learn, but weirdly intuitive, and FREE) then here is a fun and relatively easy way to give it a test drive. It is becoming a tradition that,…
The thing I love about strategists is that they know exactly what they want. By the time they come to us, they have analyzed their business needs. They have figured out what kinds of data will help them make decisions. They know why they want research, how they are going to use it, and how…
Using surveys to “quiz” people about their knowledge (versus asking them about their attitudes or behaviors) is tricky. First, online surveys make it easy for people to look up answers they may not otherwise know. Second, people want to get quiz answers right, and so they are motivated to cheat. This is the reason I…
One of the “best practices” for survey research I learned in graduate school and then early in my career is this: Survey measurement scales should have at least five points. Presumably that provides enough room for variation, and it provides a neutral midpoint as well. But it is not true. Or, like all best practices,…
The R statistical package is an amazingly powerful and versatile tool for data analysis and data visualization. When it comes to graphics and charts, here is one reason: It has foundational plotting tools that can be adapted in infinitely many ways to create (and invent) many more types of charts than you will find in…