The best innovation in qualitative methods over the last decade is not online focus groups or bulletin boards or MROCs (Market Research Online Communities). It’s the smartphone. Your customers can snap pictures, take videos, and document all their thoughts and behaviors as they go about their everyday lives, generating some of the richest qualitative data…
A really good qualitative researcher knows how hard (and how frustrating) it can be to get respondents to tell us things we want to know. We have our interview guide, with all our questions laid out in a nice logical progression. But often when we ask questions, respondents have less to say than we had…
Here’s an unfortunate reality in the world of survey research: Survey questions can sometimes be copyrighted. When certain questions (no matter how obvious and common) are asked together as a set, and then scaled into a single measure (no matter how obvious and simple), and then validated in a study as being a solid tool…
Here is an update on what went wrong with the Clinton vs. Trump polling debacle last fall, according to AAPOR’s official Evaluation of 2016 Election Polls in the U.S. that was released several weeks ago. The conclusions are based on an analysis and assessment of publicly available polling data plus additional data supplied by top…
If you grew up in the United States, you probably think big numbers are better when it comes to rating things. Higher scores on school exams are better. Higher scores in games and sports are usually better. Higher credit scores are better. Five-star restaurants are definitely better than one-star restaurants. In Germany it is often…
The pointy-hair boss has a point here, even though he does not realize it. From a research perspective, focus groups should provide rich, new, and surprising depths of insight, not necessarily “reliable” data. In fact, that’s why we typically suggest doing multiple focus groups, in different locations, with different types of participants. We want each…
Two audience members at our LIMRA talk (see Public Studies: Advice for the PR Team and Advice for the Research Team) asked questions about biased research findings. Doesn’t starting with the research story and writing dream headlines lead you down a path of finding or confirming what your internal client wants to hear? I suppose…
If you are a market research professional, I urge you to look for continuing education beyond the MR industry groups such as the Insights Association, Quirk’s, etc. and instead look to a more academic organization like AAPOR, the American Association for Public Opinion Research. Yes, their conferences will be the most boring you ever attend.…
It was so weird, right after the election, to see a media frenzy heaping praise and attention on the one poll that got it wrong. The USC/LA Times poll predicted a Trump win, with 47% of voters choosing Trump and 44% choosing Clinton. Right after the election, media headlines trumpeted its success: “How One Pollster…
Suppose your colleague left her job tomorrow and you needed to recreate, and double check, all of the work she produced for a research study just completed. You probably couldn’t do it. Think of every step along the way: exactly how the survey was programmed, how data were cleaned, why certain respondents and not others…