If you grew up in the United States, you probably think big numbers are better when it comes to rating things. Higher scores on school exams are better. Higher scores in games and sports are usually better. Higher credit scores are better. Five-star restaurants are definitely better than one-star restaurants. In Germany it is often…
We use Google Surveys for quick, cheap incidence tests, or to test question wording or answer scales. Every time I use it, however, I am startled by how foolish Google Surveys can be. Here is an example we noticed from our most recent use of the tool. Start constructing your Google Survey. Add a “single…
Of all the many components that need to come together for great research, one piece not often discussed is the art and science of getting people into your study. Recruiting respondents is part targeting, part persuasion, and part persistence. For researchers, it is probably the closest thing we do to actual marketing. In the Versta…
Gender used to be one of the easiest questions to write for a survey. There was male and there was female, so we simply asked: “Which are you?” But our culture has begun acknowledging the fluidity of gender identity and gender assignment, and now, too, must survey research. Just this week we had a potential…
Here are two ways you might ask a question to document multiple behaviors, purchases, interests, etc. They seem like they would be equivalent, but they are not. The first is called a multi-check format: The second is called a yes-no grid: If respondents were super careful, thoughtful, and unbiased in how they answer, the information…
In the Versta Research spring newsletter, Build a Better Customer Satisfaction Survey, we mentioned—but did not speak to—the seventh question in our newly developed survey for clients. It was added at the last minute. We put it right at the top, so it is the first question you see. If you didn’t yet test drive…
One memorable lesson from reading Edward Tufte’s books about visual displays of quantitative information is that charts are not the only way to display data. Indeed, they are sometimes a worse way. We should always at least consider a table as a superior alternative: Tables are clearly the best way to show exact numerical values,…
Suppose your colleague left her job tomorrow and you needed to recreate, and double check, all of the work she produced for a research study just completed. You probably couldn’t do it. Think of every step along the way: exactly how the survey was programmed, how data were cleaned, why certain respondents and not others…
Google Analytics is a great example of how powerful OR how utterly useless data can be. If you let your analytics lead you around, and you search and search, and try all those variations and data cuts hoping to land on the “actionable insight” that Google always promises—trust me, you will fail. But if you…
What does it take to be a great market research vendor? That is the animating question behind Quirk’s top-read article in 2016 written by yours truly, your friends at Versta Research. We were thinking about all the annoying things our vendors do to us, and turned them into lessons for what we at Versta believe…