We feel strongly that people who give us information through surveys, in-depth interviews, or focus group deserve a promise that this will never happen to them: Courtesy of WorkChronicles.com One of the tenets of rigorous market research is that respondent confidentiality is key. Why? Primarily because it benefits you as a client. To make smart…
Silly surveys, in all their forms, have long been a thorn in the side of authentic, truth-seeking research. When I see silly surveys, I roll my eyes and complain (to anyone who will listen) about the myriad ways in which they subtly damage the reputation and findings of good research. But here is an example…
Election season polling always highlights the danger of bad pollsters giving the market research and polling industry a bad name. While there are lots of reasons that polls might predict outcomes incorrectly (polling is far more difficult and risky than many people think) there is no excuse for deliberately bad pollsters making up data to…
This data we saw last week reflects the type of data that PR professionals absolutely dream about and hope for when they conduct surveys. It shows hugely dramatic differences among the 50 U.S. states. The media relations people were able to pitch local outlets in each state with a story about how their area and…
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…
As we celebrate the 4th of July in the U.S. this year, please make it an occasion to reflect on some of the fundamental values and public goods of our country that make market research possible. There is so much infrastructure that has been built before us. Not just road and railways, but also public…
This week one of our sample suppliers said “no” when we asked if we could re-contact respondents for a purpose other than our original request. Good thing I asked, and you know what? I’m glad they said no. I want suppliers to think carefully about seemingly simple requests, and to point out ways in which…
That Nespresso survey I got via my work email—surely it must be SPAM, right? I have no relationship with the company and have never inquired about it. Some sleazy market research company harvested a huge list of e-mails and blasted it out to hundreds of thousands of people like me. So I decided to report…
Just one month after publishing our Quick Puzzle for Market Research Brains (SPOILER ALERT! If you have not tried the puzzle yourself, do it now before continuing to read!) which demonstrated the dangers of confirmation bias, I read a report from the National Science Foundation (NSF), released in May, that warned of the same thing.…
Leave it to the National Science Foundation to keep me hip on current research lingo. A report published last May (with the very unhip title Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Perspectives on Robust and Reliable Science) offered this definition of an edgy new term in research called p-hacking: Generating many different sets of results and…