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I am the Internet user that advertisers dread. I block as much advertising, video, flash content, and java script as I possibly can so that I stay focused on work without all that annoying, flashing, moving stuff trying to grab my attention. This always makes me wonder: Am I the Internet user that market researchers…
Here is a brilliant thought experiment about big data, published as a one-paragraph short story in 1946 by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges: “. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the…
We have just published the Versta Research Fall 2015 Newsletter, offering an interactive puzzle to test your analytical skills as a research brain. It is based on a fascinating study published half a century ago in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. When I first encountered the puzzle it stuck in my mind for quite…
If ever there were evidence that phone surveys are dead, it’s this: Gallup, the undisputed king of telephone polling for decades, has withdrawn from the race. The firm announced last week that it will not conduct candidate polling for the 2016 presidential election. This comes after the miserable failure of its polling in 2012, which…
Difficult or lengthy surveys require hefty incentives, which unfortunately makes it tempting for some respondents to lie. We are facing this predicament in a survey right now. The survey requires two people from the same household who share household finances to complete parallel surveys. We are recruiting from an online research panel. Person 1 gets…
For every research rule or best practice I proclaim, I find myself doing the opposite eventually. Such is the case with pie charts. I try to avoid them, taking to heart Edward Tufte’s claim that they are dumb and should never be used. Studies show that pie charts do a poor job helping readers grasp…
In our experience, the people who write the best questionnaires are researchers who spend their time immersed in complex survey methods and quantitative analysis but who focused on qualitative research earlier in their careers. Why? Because they are deeply sensitive to the dual objectives of survey design, namely: (1) Elicit data in specific ways and…
In the months leading up to this year’s Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality, Wells Fargo worked with Versta Research on a national survey of LGBT Americans. The goal was to understand how changes in marriage laws were affecting decisions about money and marriage. What did we learn about LGBT Americans? Here are two nuggets…
Having jumped back into the 1,016-page Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence from the Federal Judicial Center and the National Research Council (see last week’s article on Defending Your Statistics in Court), I keep finding fascinating nuggets of information worth sharing with our marketing and research colleagues of all stripes. Consider this snippet from the section…
There is nothing worse than presenting research findings to an audience predisposed to hate it. Maybe you’ve had that experience of being in a boardroom of hostile managers? They don’t like what you’re about to say, so they pick at every methodological decision, shifting focus away from the story that the data have to tell.…