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This quarter’s newsletter from Versta Research focuses on the art of asking questions. We suggest that the importance of business questions far exceeds the importance of survey questions or focus group questions. You can’t do the latter without the former, at least not very well, and research that is not specifically designed to answer clearly…
When multiple surveys about the same topic give different results, consider yourself lucky. It provides an opportunity to dissect and understand the question you are trying to answer in a way you might not get otherwise. A recent New York Times article provides a nice example when it comes to polls about health care.
Nearly every survey begins with screening questions to ensure that only the people you are trying to reach are included in the survey. For example, if you are conducting a survey of women, you need to ask about gender and kick out the men. And because every question costs money, you want to qualify respondents…
Telephone surveys are still considered the gold standard for rigorous public opinion polling and market research. The reason is that virtually every household in the U.S. can be reached by telephone, and therefore we have careful methods of determining the probability that any individual person is included in a sample to be surveyed. Knowing this…
One problem with new survey technologies that make it easy (and inexpensive) to design and field surveys is that we now have an explosion of poorly done and ill-intentioned surveys. Have you ever suspected that a survey isn’t quite legit? Keeping your survey efforts honest is critical. Sincere efforts to document issues through rigorous surveys…
An article in the most recent issue of the Harvard Business Review (“Rethinking Marketing”) argues that marketing is shifting from being product-centric to being customer-centric. The old method was to develop a portfolio of products, build a team around each product, find the customers who need that product and market it to them. The emerging…
Getting your research findings heard, understood, and used should always be your goal. That means more than putting findings into a report deck, presenting results to the marketing team, writing up press releases, or getting media placement for a PR story. It means having your audience engage with it by thinking, sharing, and taking action.…
A research article the Winter 2009 issue of Public Opinion Quarterly provided some useful comparisons of data quality between phone surveys and various types of online surveys. The findings are based on an experiment that fielded identical questionnaires via three survey modes, and, not surprisingly, there are strengths and weaknesses to each type of survey.…
Data visualization will likely be one the biggest areas of innovation and development over the next several years. This is a good. A chart that clearly and succinctly displays detailed data in a way that captures the viewer’s attention and helps interpret the data can be incredibly powerful. Edward Tufte, a pioneer in this area,…
It hurts, but when your customers hate you, you should be listening all the more carefully: You need to find out the who, what, where, when, and why they hate you. Probe deeply with focus groups, in-depth interviews, social media monitoring, and survey research. Rigorous research done right (our specialty) will give you valuable insight. …