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There are good reasons to avoid phone surveys if you can. But if there is no alternative, it is critical to think about strategies for integrating cell phones into your outreach and sampling. Almost half (48%) of U.S. adults have no landline telephone service, while fewer than one in ten (9%) have no cell phone…
The evidence continues to mount that phone surveys should be a method of last resort. Pew Research Center has released results of an experiment conducted in 2014 to test mode differences in how surveys are administered. The research question was whether people answer survey questions differently when responding to a real person on a telephone…
Or, at least, design thinking should be invading your market research, because it is invading the brains of business executives. The New York Times describes IBM as being on a mission to hire 1,500 design school graduates, and embedding them in all of its product teams. The Harvard Business Review published an issue in September…
A simple technique that will measurably improve your data quality is to offer survey response options that go from low to high, or from bad to good. Start with things like terrible, zero, poor, disagree, and so on. Then move towards spectacular, excellent, ten, and agree.
Yesterday we were in Milwaukee at a film studio, shooting for a soon-to-be-released Versta Research video about making research matter. It explains how to design and execute research to ensure that it gets heard, understood, and put into action by your business partners. The video outlines three tips. Here’s the first: begin by writing dream…
Just one month after publishing our Quick Puzzle for Market Research Brains (SPOILER ALERT! If you have not tried the puzzle yourself, do it now before continuing to read!) which demonstrated the dangers of confirmation bias, I read a report from the National Science Foundation (NSF), released in May, that warned of the same thing.…
Leave it to the National Science Foundation to keep me hip on current research lingo. A report published last May (with the very unhip title Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Perspectives on Robust and Reliable Science) offered this definition of an edgy new term in research called p-hacking: Generating many different sets of results and…
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…