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Communicating statistics is sometimes harder than doing statistics. While statistics is all about formulas and logic and precision, words and sentences are all about communicating layers of meaning that are often ambiguous and nuanced. For this reason we often recommend a quick, online refresher course called “Math for Journalists” for our PR, marketing, and journalism…
By which we really mean How to Label Your 11-Point Scale because you shouldn’t be using 10-point scales. Plenty of research shows that numeric scales going from 1 to 10 (ten points) are less effective than numeric scales going from 0 to 10 (eleven points). A recently published article in Survey Practice adds more evidence…
Try as we might, most of us are guilty of cramming too much data into our research reports and presentations. But why is this so bad? Can’t we help the reader along with executive summaries and a concise narrative in headlines, and all the extra stuff pushed into appendices? Why not offer details and high…
You would think that the chancellor of a prestigious school like M.I.T.—a university that prides itself on practical applications of mathematics—would know something about how probabilities work with survey sampling. Apparently not. Quoting a New York Times article about M.I.T.’s survey of students about sexual assault on campus:
Dealing with vendors often makes me cranky, but it always reminds me of the things Versta Research should be doing when working with our own customers. Over the years I have taken careful note of the things our best vendors do to capture my loyalty. They have me turning to them again and again without…
A vivid illustration of a statistically spurious relationship is this: People who wear hats tend to drive slower. But there is no causal relationship, as hats don’t cause people to drive slower. It’s just that older people wear hats more than younger people, and older people tend to drive slower. That’s actually kind of interesting,…
Getting good responses to open-ended questions via online surveys is a challenge. So much so, that new technologies have evolved to probe on responses just as live interviewers used to probe people on phone surveys. But can you get really outstanding open-end responses to online surveys without fancy technology? The answer is yes, it just…
Survey invitations are like elevator pitches. You’ve got 30 seconds (or fewer) to grab attention and convince a reader that it’s worth investing time to take your survey. Survey response rates are declining, but there are easy ways to cut through the clutter and boost your own. Here is a before-and-after example of a survey…
I recently came across this strange big book, the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, compiled by the Federal Judicial Center and the National Research Council. It’s not fun reading, but it provides an enormously useful and fascinating overview of what makes social and marketing research (and other kinds of scientific research, too) sufficiently rigorous to…
Just last week a client proposed having their salespeople recruit customers to take the loyalty and satisfaction survey we had launched for them. It’s a terrible idea, for exactly the reasons that Dagwood realizes with his baffled look in this cartoon. If you want honest feedback that your business unit can honestly use to improve,…