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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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Versta Research fields omnibus surveys, and we often recommend such surveys for our clients. But omnibus surveys do no not always save money or offer the insights that are needed, and so we often recommend inexpensive alternatives as well. In years past, data collection was a slow, complicated, and expensive task. If you had just…
Testing a survey before it launches takes about 4 to 6 hours of an experienced professional’s time, for a standard ten- to fifteen-minute survey. If you don’t invest that time up front, you are almost certain to discover mistakes while in the field (or worse: after), which can make for a nightmare of programming corrections…
Quite by accident, I just discovered the best new tool for reading and fixing research reports: the Read-Aloud function in Microsoft Office programs. It helps spot typos, missing or extra words, misspellings, grammatical mistakes and awkward phrases — everything I need to fix my writing before finalizing and sharing written text about research and surveys…
This summer you will not have to schlep to Ann Arbor for a month if you want to take advantage of top-notch summer training courses in survey research offered at the University of Michigan. Everything is being offered online this year! It is a perfect opportunity for corporate researchers and others who work on the…
A public relations client early in my career gave this assessment of my work: “Joe is strong at highlighting problems, but what I really care about is solutions.” That was many years ago, after I left university teaching and started doing client work full time. Her words have stayed with me and deeply shaped the…
This data we saw last week reflects the type of data that PR professionals absolutely dream about and hope for when they conduct surveys. It shows hugely dramatic differences among the 50 U.S. states. The media relations people were able to pitch local outlets in each state with a story about how their area and…
Contrary to some widely held beliefs that mobile devices are a barrier to survey participation, a majority of survey respondents nowadays fill them out on phones, rather than on desktops, laptops, or tablets. Research has amply documented that the quality and reliability of data collected via mobile devices is comparable to data collected on desktops.…
It is possible now to get thousands of responses to a survey overnight so that you can turn around research results as quickly as your managers and clients want. Would you trust the findings? I hope not. Suppose you want a general population survey that truly represents all U.S. adults. You will need to ensure…
Oddly enough, there are market research consultants who are unaware that they (and you, and anybody in the world) can have direct access to census data files for analysis. We just wrote a newsletter about the value of census data, and about the amazing rigor that goes into validating questions like those on race &…
If demographic benchmarks and trends are essential to your business and the research you conduct (things like age, gender, race, ethnicity, and region) then our just-published 2020 Spring Newsletter has information you absolutely need to know. The U.S. Census Bureau continues to change how it collects and classifies demographic data. Right now the Bureau is…