Leave it to the National Science Foundation to keep me hip on current research lingo. A report published last May (with the very unhip title Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Perspectives on Robust and Reliable Science) offered this definition of an edgy new term in research called p-hacking: Generating many different sets of results and…
I am the Internet user that advertisers dread. I block as much advertising, video, flash content, and java script as I possibly can so that I stay focused on work without all that annoying, flashing, moving stuff trying to grab my attention. This always makes me wonder: Am I the Internet user that market researchers…
Difficult or lengthy surveys require hefty incentives, which unfortunately makes it tempting for some respondents to lie. We are facing this predicament in a survey right now. The survey requires two people from the same household who share household finances to complete parallel surveys. We are recruiting from an online research panel. Person 1 gets…
There is nothing worse than presenting research findings to an audience predisposed to hate it. Maybe you’ve had that experience of being in a boardroom of hostile managers? They don’t like what you’re about to say, so they pick at every methodological decision, shifting focus away from the story that the data have to tell.…
If you found that 10% of your online survey respondents were ignoring your questions, generating random data, and there was an easy way to identify who those respondents were, what would you do? I hope you would delete them, go back to the field, and replace them. But for some reason there are those among…
Despite the welcome trend towards online polling, telephone surveys are still surprisingly common, and telephone outreach makes sense for certain types of research. But if you ever use or commission phone surveys, take note: do not use automated dialing to make calls. Instead, have interviewers manually dial the numbers so you don’t get caught in…
Earlier this year we trumpeted the idea of corporate research groups helping internal business partners do their own research. Sometimes is makes tons of sense, and sometimes not. So when it comes time for something more complicated, how do you educate a client about what matters and what doesn’t in terms of quality and rigor?…
Two things bugged me about the market research survey invitation I got from my alma mater. First, it was a mediocre three star survey that asked me a bunch of information they could easily have gotten from my LinkedIn profile. Second, it offered a chance to win a prize if I participated, and the effort…
I’ve never been a huge fan of talking about generations like Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, or Millennials. Age differences make sense to me. But the dividing lines between “generations” commonly used in the media and in our industry seem so arbitrary. In fact, those dividing lines put me in the same generation as my aunts…
If you are not testing all of your surveys for how they function on mobile, you absolutely should be. Almost half of respondents in our most recent U.S. census-rep survey completed the survey on mobile devices. This included 30% who completed it on phones, and 17% who completed it on tablets. Here is a quick…