Every day I get a digest of new posts from R-Bloggers, a community of 555+ bloggers who are devoted to using R and sharing what they learn with others. Even though you can’t learn how to use R by reading these posts, once you’ve jumped into the world of R with an in-depth tutorial or…
Try as we might, most of us are guilty of cramming too much data into our research reports and presentations. But why is this so bad? Can’t we help the reader along with executive summaries and a concise narrative in headlines, and all the extra stuff pushed into appendices? Why not offer details and high…
I’ve always felt suspicious of consultants who claim to spend the bulk of their time solving business problems and offering insights and, by the way, they also do market research. Then I get a look at their research, and my suspicions are confirmed. So often the data is a MESS—an absolute mess that baffles me…
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…
A couple weeks ago we wrote about the crucial need to have (and ideally review) your raw data. We pointed to an article in the New York Times Magazine about a prominent professor in social psychology who faked his data and never provided the raw data for his colleagues and co-authors to review. What we…
Last week, Versta Research celebrated its 5th birthday—an important milestone in a twenty-year journey that has involved rigorous training and building significant capabilities that help clients solve research problems. <<Applause! Singing! Cake!>> “Speech! Speech!” Hmmmm, a speech. . . . Well, recently we formulated new year’s resolutions and described where we are headed as we enter the second half…
As we get further along in our careers most of us get further away from the nitty-gritty of data collection, data coding, and sometimes even data analysis. But I always feel nervous about that distance, and usually want to take a quick scan through the raw data myself. I want to see all those rows…
Versta Research’s winter newsletter comes out next week, which will focus on some new approaches to faster (and cheaper) market research. In the meantime we have been thinking a good deal about where to invest in new methods and innovation during the coming year so that we continue to make our work better and smarter…
Or at the very least, ignorance should drive market research because fundamentally research should be about findings answers to questions that we do not already know. This idea for focusing on “ignorance” is inspired by a book published last year called Ignorance: How It Drives Science, by Stuart Firestein. Applied to our industry, the argument…
This picture sits on my bookshelf, right next to my computer monitor, and reminds me all day long about the importance of getting close to your data. It was one of my first research jobs out of college, working for Tom Greene at St. Lawrence University. We hiked up mountains in the Adirondacks, waited at…