While it is tempting to use advanced programming to “force” good answers and good behavior out of survey respondents, don’t do it. Let respondents make mistakes. Let them mess up, and then review who messes up. This is one of the best ways to assess data quality in a survey, and trust me you will…
Survey response rates, which are still a measure of data quality and survey success in our industry, continue to drop. Most online surveys of customers (one’s own customers) will garner response rates of two to three percent—and that is if you are lucky and if you do everything right. Rigorously executed phone surveys achieve miserably…
Having focused intently over the last several months on best practices for writing surveys (see Five Last Steps in Writing a Questionnaire and How to Write Surveys: 25 Best Practices) I have been paying extra attention to the work of research methodologists who codify best practices and develop protocols for implementing them. One set of…
There are two things that make me most proud of my company, Versta Research. First is the work that clients pay us to do, because we put so much thought, care, and rigor into delivering the insights they need. Nothing goes out the door without me feeling like we’ve “owned” the work completely, and I…
So why are we asking them to do our jobs? I ask this question a lot when we execute surveys for marketing and business strategists. They’re smart people who want us to synthesize lots of data into compelling stories for their business clients. They love to assemble data into dashboards, visualizations, and grids. But they…
Extremely careful researchers work hard to make sure their surveys reach broad and representative samples of their target populations. This usually involves multiple attempts to reach out via multiple phone calls, e-mails, or letters of request. Since statistical models of inference presume 100% response rates within random samples, the goal is always to get response…
I never speak ill of competitors. In fact, I like them and value them. Whenever I am able to partner with them, I learn a great deal, and they make my work better. So this article might seem like a departure, except I’m not sure if this company is a competitor. I will refrain from…
In our fall newsletter we purposely glossed over the “standard” best practices in writing surveys that one typically reads about in text books or learns in research methods classes. We wanted to give you a deep-dive into our own five last steps in writing a questionnaire that focused on advanced topics like randomization, programming logic,…
What do you do when faced with a skeptical audience of business executives who are predisposed to disagree with your research findings? It is tempting to leave out the boring methodological details of how your research was conducted, who you interviewed, your assessment of the data’s validity and reliability, and so on (“Toss all that…
In quantitative survey research, the questionnaire affects nearly everything else that is critical to a study: the data, the analysis, and the findings. And because of this, writing surveys is the component of research that requires more on-the-job experience than any other. It requires thinking on multiple levels about all other aspects of the research…