If ever there were evidence that phone surveys are dead, it’s this: Gallup, the undisputed king of telephone polling for decades, has withdrawn from the race. The firm announced last week that it will not conduct candidate polling for the 2016 presidential election. This comes after the miserable failure of its polling in 2012, which…
Difficult or lengthy surveys require hefty incentives, which unfortunately makes it tempting for some respondents to lie. We are facing this predicament in a survey right now. The survey requires two people from the same household who share household finances to complete parallel surveys. We are recruiting from an online research panel. Person 1 gets…
Despite the welcome trend towards online polling, telephone surveys are still surprisingly common, and telephone outreach makes sense for certain types of research. But if you ever use or commission phone surveys, take note: do not use automated dialing to make calls. Instead, have interviewers manually dial the numbers so you don’t get caught in…
OK, using the word stalker instead of remarketing lists is harsh, but it perfectly conveys the idea behind Google Consumer Surveys’ (GCS) latest innovation for market research. You can use cookie lists from web pages to target people based on specific content they are viewing. Want to survey people who were on your website last…
If you are not testing all of your surveys for how they function on mobile, you absolutely should be. Almost half of respondents in our most recent U.S. census-rep survey completed the survey on mobile devices. This included 30% who completed it on phones, and 17% who completed it on tablets. Here is a quick…
A perennial problem with open-ended survey questions is that respondents are lazy. It takes time and effort to think of good answers. And if the survey is self-administered online or on paper, it takes time and effort to write them out. But there are several things a savvy researcher can do. One of them is…
Getting good responses to open-ended questions via online surveys is a challenge. So much so, that new technologies have evolved to probe on responses just as live interviewers used to probe people on phone surveys. But can you get really outstanding open-end responses to online surveys without fancy technology? The answer is yes, it just…
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…
Telephones used to be an awesome way to find a random sample of Americans. Nearly all Americans had a home telephone, nearly everybody would answer if you called, and most were willing to answer survey questions to help researchers understand public opinion. In fact, telephones have been so central to scientific survey research that the…