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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Versta Research Post

Testing Your Data for Illusions

Here’s a useful way to think about statistical significance.  When looking at your data, what’s the probability that it looks like something is there, when in fact nothing is there.  Randomness in data (because of sampling) often causes illusions.  So testing for significance is all about measuring whether the patterns we see in our data…

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Scrolling vs. Paging on Mobile Surveys

Scrolling vs. Paging on Mobile Surveys

As more and more people use smartphones and mobile devices to fill out surveys, basic survey design decisions need to be revisited again and again.  How should surveys be laid out visually?  How should answer scales be constructed?  How should people be recruited to take surveys? Some of the latest answers to these questions come…

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Cool Christmas Drawings with R

Cool Christmas Drawings with R

Every day I get a digest of new posts from R-Bloggers, a community of 555+ bloggers who are devoted to using R and sharing what they learn with others. Even though you can’t learn how to use R by reading these posts, once you’ve jumped into the world of R with an in-depth tutorial or…

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Versta Research Post

Train Wreck Infographics

When we published our July 2014 newsletter on How to Make Spectacular Infographics, we spent some time looking for examples of poorly done infographics. Ultimately we decided to focus only on the positive “what-to-do” for infographics instead of the negative “what-not-to-do,” so we set those examples aside. Well, along comes the latest news magazine from…

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Seeing Stories Everywhere

Seeing Stories Everywhere

There’s nothing worse than having your research be a pile of numbers with no obvious story. Or maybe there is. What if every random set of numbers told a story?  Or, worse yet, what if our brains could find a story in every random set of numbers, even if a story is not there?  There…

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Versta Research Post

Telltale Signs of a Pointless Poll

[SEE CARTOON] Of course those 99% keep reading the pointless polls, and most research firms are happy to keep generating pointless polls. The problem? Too few research firms are willing and able to help clients differentiate a survey that is informative and truly worthy of print, versus one that is pointless. So how do you…

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