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.
Tempted to Try SMS Text Message Surveys? Don’t Bother.
I was getting ready to write this article with a prediction that soon you will be inundated with pitches for the latest “innovation” in survey technology, and what do you know, this arrived in my junk mail folder: TIRED OF LOW CELL PHONE SURVEY RESPONSE RATES? We offer SMS Text Message Surveys TCPA Compliant Solution…
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…
A Christmas for Research Nerds
A few weeks we wrote about launching surveys over holidays, and we quoted research noting that there is scant evidence for the widespread assumption that holidays periods should be avoided. Lest you now find yourself working over the Christmas holiday trying to squeeze in the last round of data collection getting input from every last…
Response Rates for Phone Surveys Plummet to 1%
In just the last thirty-five years, response rates for telephone surveys have been plummeting. In the 1980s, response rates of 70% or higher were common for well-designed and carefully executed phone surveys. They decreased into the 60% range in the 1990s. And then by the end of the decade, response rates of 30% to 40%…
Nine Ways to Rescue a Failing Phone Survey
Believe it or not, there are still plenty of phone surveys being done out there, especially for local needs assessments and evaluation surveys. Often these surveys are mandated by state or local governments to ensure that the right services are reaching people who need them. But phone surveys are extremely difficult to field anymore, as…
More Evidence that Online Polls Work (Really Well)
You might think that writing a feature article about liars, cheaters, and trolls in online surveys means we have a pretty damning view of online polls as a method of research. Not so. We are all in when it comes to online polling, and in fact it comprises the majority of the survey research we…
Truly Amazing Stats about Phone Surveys
I’ve been reading through a report from the AAPOR Task Force on The Future of U.S. General Population Telephone Survey Research, which I thought might be interesting and provocative, given how oddly reluctant the organization has been to embrace online methods. Only a few years ago AAPOR (the American Association of Public Opinion Research) finally…
Versta Blog Makes Public Opinion Quarterly
This familiar sentence opens the lead article of Public Opinion Quarterly’s 2017 special issue on survey research: “Telephone surveys are dead, claim some survey researchers, and should be replaced with nonprobability samples from Internet panels.” Hmm, I’ve said something similar to that in the past, I thought to myself. I guess I’m not the only…
How Many Questions in a 10-Minute Survey?
It all depends on what counts as a “question,” and also on how complex those questions are. A grid question with multiple rows takes a longer to answer than a simple yes-or-no question. A question that allows you to select multiple items from a laundry list of options takes longer than a standard 4-point scale.…