Market research has made it all the way to the top! It has a seat at the c-suite table just as marketing and research champions have hoped for all these years. According to a recent analysis by The Wall Street Journal, a large number of CEOs now track their company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) obsessively,…
The New York Times’ recent brand and marketing campaign is all about Truth. Well, if Truth really matters, then they desperately need a good old fashioned survey to back their flimsy claims in a recent article about how small business owners view the candidates running for president. In a front-page article of the business section…
Any good researcher should agonize over mode effects in surveys. Mode effects are differences in statistical estimates caused by the “mode” through which respondents take a survey. If there are mode effects, then how the survey is conducted (by telephone, online, through a smartphone app, in person, or by mail) will affect the results, requiring…
Having focused intently over the last several months on best practices for writing surveys (see Five Last Steps in Writing a Questionnaire and How to Write Surveys: 25 Best Practices) I have been paying extra attention to the work of research methodologists who codify best practices and develop protocols for implementing them. One set of…
I once heard from an overzealous boss with a Ph.D. in political science that measurement scales should always have an odd number of scale points – the reason being that measurement scales should always have a neutral middle. We sometimes hear this from clients reviewing survey drafts as well: “Shouldn’t every question have a neither,…
One of the “best practices” for survey research I learned in graduate school and then early in my career is this: Survey measurement scales should have at least five points. Presumably that provides enough room for variation, and it provides a neutral midpoint as well. But it is not true. Or, like all best practices,…
Most companies test new product or service ideas with concept tests to evaluate market interest and to refine their ideas. Most of these (like most surveys, nowadays) are conducted online, which offers speed and cost efficiency. But there is a downside. While people are quite adept at reviewing ideas and answering questions in online formats,…
There are plenty of good reasons to use Net Promoter Scores (NPS). They are based on sound measurement, are simple to use, are conceptually compelling, and are widely known by business executives outside of market research. But you know something is amiss when your bank starts asking how likely you are to recommend the online…
An irony of survey researchers’ obsession with high response rates is that higher response rates often hurt data quality. How can that be? It happens because aggressive recruiting boosts the participation of people who provide less reliable information. Two academic articles published in a special issue of Public Opinion Quarterly on “total survey error” nicely…
I used to get more worked up about survey answer scales than I do nowadays. I didn’t like even-numbered scales, including 1 to 10 scales (no midpoint!) or five point scales (too blunt!) or seven or nine point scales (not intuitive!). I liked zero to ten scales—and still do—because they offer good opportunity for respondent…