Mobile Phones Still Present Challenges for Market Research
Cell phone dialing is now essential for phone surveys, just as mobile-optimized surveys are essential for online surveys. A lot of market research continues to ignore this.
How to Test Knowledge and Misperceptions on a Survey
It’s not easy to use a survey to measure public knowledge or misperceptions. Why? Because surveys are not quizzes. Respondents expect you to ask questions they can answer truthfully and correctly based on their opinions and experience. As good researchers, we mostly try to reassure respondents: “There are no right or wrong answers! Please give…
Are They Cheating or Helping? New Research on Survey “Cheating” Raises Thorny Issue
An endearing trait of survey respondents is that most are sincerely interested in helping you. They want to offer authentic opinions. They want to provide you with good data. I was reminded of this when reading findings from a study about survey “cheating” in a recent issue of Public Opinion Quarterly. The researchers (at the…
Survey Respondent Demand Is Outpacing Supply: That’s Why Your Research Might Be Failing
The COVID-19 pandemic decimated the research industry’s respondent panels, and here’s the impact it is having on our (and your) research today. All of a sudden, research came to a halt in early 2020. Clients wanted their fieldwork put on hold for six months or more. Panel companies stopped investing in and nurturing their panels.…
For Better Response Rates, Try Dumping Qualtrics for Mail Chimp
If you suffer from miserably low response rates to surveys you send with your own e-mail list, here’s something to try: Dump the e-mail invitation functionality that is built into your survey platform like Qualtrics. Instead, use a stand-alone email tool like Mail Chimp or Constant Contact. This will make your life harder, and it…
Finding Fraud in Public Polls: Our AAPOR Presentation
Versta Research is presenting this week at the 76th annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). The conference is being held virtually from May 11 to 14, 2021. The presentation is called Finding Fraud in Public Polls: Employing Semantic Network-Based Methods for Identifying Fraud in Online Sampling. It is a reflection…
The Rigors of Good Research: Three Examples from Thought Leadership
One of the biggest challenges Versta Research faced during the first year of COVID-19 was a huge and puzzling spike in the amount of fraud on research panels. We saw many organizations falling victim to this fraud. There were obviously false studies with absurdly sensational headlines being published by the media and in scientific journals.…
A Checklist for Testing Surveys
We recently offered an article about needing to “punish test” surveys lest you end up with a mess of mistakes like text piping that fails, or survey layouts that do not to adapt to user devices. But how do you actually punish test a survey? The best way, we think, is to start with a…
4 Things to Ponder Before Choosing an Omnibus Survey
Versta Research fields omnibus surveys, and we often recommend such surveys for our clients. But omnibus surveys do no not always save money or offer the insights that are needed, and so we often recommend inexpensive alternatives as well. In years past, data collection was a slow, complicated, and expensive task. If you had just…
Here’s Why You Should “Punish Test” Your Surveys
Testing a survey before it launches takes about 4 to 6 hours of an experienced professional’s time, for a standard ten- to fifteen-minute survey. If you don’t invest that time up front, you are almost certain to discover mistakes while in the field (or worse: after), which can make for a nightmare of programming corrections…