The next time you analyze the results of your customer satisfaction or brand loyalty tracking study, and you notice an upward or downward shift, ask yourself this: Is it reasonable to think that certain customers—either the happy ones or the unhappy ones—were more willing to give you their opinions than the other group? If so,…
It’s the data. We want it all. And to be fair, this article is less about Qualtrics, and more about what makes for truly good and rigorous research. It just turns out that Qualtrics is the one tool that makes it more difficult and more expensive to do that kind of research than any others…
Question order in surveys matters a lot more than most of us realize, which makes it critical to assess what you most want to know before your survey respondents are influenced (or, in the language or survey experts, “primed”) by additional questions on the topic. Here is a superb example from last fall’s political polling…
By elephants, we mean Republicans. Or maybe you have too many Democrats. Maybe it keeps going back and forth, which is the problem that Gallup sometimes has. In the spirit of learning all we can from election season polling, this week we focus on whom to include (or exclude) in your research, analysis, and market…
Way back in 1944, Edwards Deming published an article in the American Sociological Review that could be required reading for anybody who does research today. He outlined all potential (and unfortunately, common) sources of error in survey research. Apparently our contemporary obsession with sample sizes, random samples, response rates, and margins of error is not…
Most people who take surveys want to share their opinions, which is important for researchers hoping to get a few nuggets of data from willing respondents. The trouble is, if a survey it not written carefully, a respondent’s urgent desire to share their feelings may bias their answers to other questions. Two marketing professors at…
How big of a sample size do you really need? A recent article in the New York Times cited the following statistics: A small Voice of the Customer (VoC) research company called Mindshare Technologies collects satisfaction data from 175,000 respondents every day. That’s 60 million in a year. ForeSee, a small customer experience analytics firm…
Many of us in marketing research have been deploying web surveys for over ten years, and web surveys are, by far, the dominant mode of data collection in our industry nowadays. But our techniques and methods are an amalgam of practices adapted from other data collection modes, learned in part through trial and error, and…
These days most researchers agree that if you want to do a random sample phone survey of the U.S. population, you ought to include cell phones. More than one-quarter of the population do not have landline telephones at home. Those who do have landline telephones are less likely than ever to answer them, and less…
A new study presented by two professors from Harvard University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst was probably one of the liveliest and potentially disruptive presentations at least week’s annual meeting of the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) in Phoenix. Why? Because their research challenges the beliefs of many AAPOR-ites who disregard…