It’s not easy to use a survey to measure public knowledge or misperceptions. Why? Because surveys are not quizzes. Respondents expect you to ask questions they can answer truthfully and correctly based on their opinions and experience. As good researchers, we mostly try to reassure respondents: “There are no right or wrong answers! Please give…
An endearing trait of survey respondents is that most are sincerely interested in helping you. They want to offer authentic opinions. They want to provide you with good data. I was reminded of this when reading findings from a study about survey “cheating” in a recent issue of Public Opinion Quarterly. The researchers (at the…
Last week we showed you a survey that might convince you to think twice about hiring a super high-end consulting firm for your survey research and insights. Fancy business consultants may know a lot about business, but they know little about gathering good data to answer their business questions. So this week, instead of focusing…
Ever wonder what you get if you hire a fancy schmancy consulting firm for your survey research and marketing insights, instead of Versta Research? Every once in a while we have a potential client who insists: “Give us IBM! Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” I got a view into what those surveys look…
One refrain you will see on these pages throughout 2021 is that the time of cheap and easy online surveys is probably coming to a bitter, crashing end. Response rates are plummeting, even lower than we thought possible. Cheap online research panels (which are used for the vast majority of market research) are rife with…
The COVID-19 pandemic decimated the research industry’s respondent panels, and here’s the impact it is having on our (and your) research today. All of a sudden, research came to a halt in early 2020. Clients wanted their fieldwork put on hold for six months or more. Panel companies stopped investing in and nurturing their panels.…
If you suffer from miserably low response rates to surveys you send with your own e-mail list, here’s something to try: Dump the e-mail invitation functionality that is built into your survey platform like Qualtrics. Instead, use a stand-alone email tool like Mail Chimp or Constant Contact. This will make your life harder, and it…
Versta Research is presenting this week at the 76th annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). The conference is being held virtually from May 11 to 14, 2021. The presentation is called Finding Fraud in Public Polls: Employing Semantic Network-Based Methods for Identifying Fraud in Online Sampling. It is a reflection…
I was getting ready to write this article with a prediction that soon you will be inundated with pitches for the latest “innovation” in survey technology, and what do you know, this arrived in my junk mail folder: TIRED OF LOW CELL PHONE SURVEY RESPONSE RATES? We offer SMS Text Message Surveys TCPA Compliant Solution…
We recently offered an article about needing to “punish test” surveys lest you end up with a mess of mistakes like text piping that fails, or survey layouts that do not to adapt to user devices. But how do you actually punish test a survey? The best way, we think, is to start with a…