Contrary to some widely held beliefs that mobile devices are a barrier to survey participation, a majority of survey respondents nowadays fill them out on phones, rather than on desktops, laptops, or tablets. Research has amply documented that the quality and reliability of data collected via mobile devices is comparable to data collected on desktops.…
It is possible now to get thousands of responses to a survey overnight so that you can turn around research results as quickly as your managers and clients want. Would you trust the findings? I hope not. Suppose you want a general population survey that truly represents all U.S. adults. You will need to ensure…
If demographic benchmarks and trends are essential to your business and the research you conduct (things like age, gender, race, ethnicity, and region) then our just-published 2020 Spring Newsletter has information you absolutely need to know. The U.S. Census Bureau continues to change how it collects and classifies demographic data. Right now the Bureau is…
In basic stats class, all of us learned about the importance of random sampling. It provides the foundation for the iron-clad mathematics of estimation, statistical significance, and margins of error. But the problem in social science, market research, and opinion polling is that random sampling (sometimes referred to as probability sampling) almost never exists. So…
I write a lot about how robots are messing up market research. But yesterday, I had the happy experience of a robot helping us in a surprising a way. It flagged an error in a list of competitive brands for an ATU study (Attitudes, Trial, and Usage)—an error that would invalidated our results if we…
Telling stories is a natural human behavior, but also highly complex and difficult to imitate or automate. This means that, happily, trolls can’t tell stories. And asking survey respondents for an extremely brief story (even just a few words) about their experience related to a survey topic can help you differentiate real respondents from fake…
I don’t know how big the Versta Research blog fan base is, but at the very least, the Quirk’s editors seem to follow us, and sometimes they ask for permission to reprint an article. Such was the case for an article we wrote last month about anonymity in research. The gist of that article was…
In our company we nearly always try to keep data collection “anonymous.” This means that for most of our surveys we intentionally do not know the identity of who participates (though our sample providers do). We rarely ask for any type of identifying information, not even a first name. If for some reason we have…
It really bugged me that I got this “survey” invitation last week, in part because it conforms so well to many of the best practices we advise for designing effective survey invitations. Take a look: It offers a generous incentive. It has a nice graphic saying how long the survey takes. It has a prominent…
A survey platform we have been using launched a new service promising an “expert review” of our surveys before we send them out for data collection. Unfortunately, it is a gimmick. It turns out that there are no experts reviewing our surveys. An artificial intelligence robot reviews them. It was interesting to see which best…