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Market researchers complain a lot when they get data back from surveys and see that people have been “speeding” through their surveys or that people are not giving thoughtful responses. But the problem is rarely “bad respondents” – instead the problem is lazy researchers. When people discover that the survey they just agreed to take…
One of the cool things about social science and marketing research is that it brings together mathematics and human behavior. Mathematics is beautiful, elegant, and abstract. It is much like art. Human behavior is messy, contradictory, and frustrating, desperately in need of a way to make sense of it. Bringing the two together – turning…
It’s fascinating that new survey technology and easy access to millions of consumers could be affecting the focus group industry more than the quantitative survey industry. But a colleague who has been doing focus groups for over 20 years says that’s exactly what she is seeing.
Good open-ended questions and thoughtful responses to these questions can yield amazingly rich and insightful data. But given the generally poor quality of responses to open-ended question in mail surveys, some have speculated that open-ended questions in online surveys would suffer a similar fate. Research seems to show this is not the case. Further, a…
How to Add Value: Provide Insight and Understanding In a provocative new book entitled What Would Google Do? author Jeff Jarvis claims that “Middlemen Are Doomed” because the Internet has made information so easy, accessible, and cheap. He argues that the Internet links buyers and sellers directly, and it allows buyers to get information and…
Mistakes to Avoid when Conducting a Public Relations Survey Surveys and polls can be powerful tools to understand what people are thinking and doing, and they can provide good data for public relations efforts and community outreach. Unfortunately they can also be gimmicks, which erodes trust in polling and in the organizations sponsoring them.