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Earlier this month Arthur C. Nielsen, Jr. died. He left behind a giant and reputable market research company and a brand name recognized throughout the world. The A.C. Nielsen company was started by his father and in its early years tracked the sales of goods through grocery and drug stores. The company then moved into…
Many of us have uneasy feelings when reading statistics that presumably apply to ourselves and our own lives. Often the statistics do not seem to “fit” and seem to misrepresent the lives of real people from which the statistics are derived. It is with good reason that we chuckle when someone tells us that the…
In response to last week’s newsletter, Is Your Research Good Enough for The New York Times?, which discussed hurdles of getting online survey research reported by some news organizations, a customer reminded us that online surveys can be difficult to sell internally as well. Too many people have been burned by junk data from online…
Is it true that the Associated Press refuses to carry stories from online surveys? Yes, as odd as that seems nowadays. But news media face a difficult problem given how easy it is to conduct biased public opinion polling, especially now with online panels and social networks. So some news organizations like the Associated Press…
Two researchers at the U.S. Census Bureau recently outlined an emerging innovation in survey research that could reverse the trend towards passive, boring, self-administered surveys that characterizes much online research. The idea is to use internet avatars in real-time interviewing with survey respondents. Beyond just the heightened interest of having an animated survey, the avatars…
MaxDiff is a survey method used to measure the importance of product features. Subsets of features are presented, and respondents are asked to select which feature is most important and which feature is least important. Its advantage over other techniques is that by forcing a choice from among multiple features, it more strongly differentiates the…
Turning data into stories involves not just words, but pictures as well. In the world of quantitative market research, that usually means charts, graphs, and tables. Moreover, just like poorly written sentences that often complicate rather than clarify data, charts and graphs in market research too often suffer from “chartjunk,” as Edward Tufte calls it. …
The hardest part of quantitative market research is not that it involves numbers, math, or even statistics, but that it involves complex problems in probability. Over the past several years, psychologists have been documenting how difficult it is for us humans to solve even “simple” probability problems. One fascinating example is a puzzle known as…
Recent social psychological research on consumer decision making suggests that making choices and deciding among alternatives depletes mental energy. With each choice we make, it gets harder and harder to make the next choice, and our brains start looking for “shortcuts” to make the task easier. The research, reported this week in The New York…
The most recent government estimates of cell phone usage among U.S. households were released a few weeks back, and the pace at which landline usage is disappearing is astonishing. Here are just some of the numbers: Thirty percent of U.S. households do not have a landline telephone An additional 16% have a landline telephone, but…