The Rigors of Good Research: Three Examples from Thought Leadership

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.…

Mobile Surveys Are Better in One Surprising Way: You Get More Revealing Personal Information

Mobile Surveys Are Better in One Surprising Way: You Get More Revealing Personal Information

Contrary to some widely held beliefs that mobile devices are a barrier to survey participation, a majority of survey respondents nowadays fill them out on phones, rather than on desktops, laptops, or tablets. Research has amply documented that the quality and reliability of data collected via mobile devices is comparable to data collected on desktops.…

Forget the Math — For Good Sampling You Need Equality, Inclusion, and Representation.

Forget the Math — For Good Sampling You Need Equality, Inclusion, and Representation

In basic stats class, all of us learned about the importance of random sampling. It provides the foundation for the iron-clad mathematics of estimation, statistical significance, and margins of error. But the problem in social science, market research, and opinion polling is that random sampling (sometimes referred to as probability sampling) almost never exists. So…

How to Trap Survey Trolls: Ask Them for a Story

How to Trap Survey Trolls: Ask Them for a Story

Telling stories is a natural human behavior, but also highly complex and difficult to imitate or automate. This means that, happily, trolls can’t tell stories. And asking survey respondents for an extremely brief story (even just a few words) about their experience related to a survey topic can help you differentiate real respondents from fake…

How Customers Want to Be Surveyed

How Customers Want to Be Surveyed

Let’s suppose that customers want to be surveyed. What is the best way to do it? Should we call them, send email, use text messaging, push surveys through mobile apps, or send old-fashioned paper surveys through the mail? This is a question we rarely ask in market research, because for most survey research we desperately…