In an article published some years ago entitled Data-Driven Journalism, Walker Sands, a Chicago-based marketing and PR agency, outlined two ways to get media placement for your company or your client with research. Their premise was that journalists and readers are hungry for interesting stories, and in today’s data-driven world, some of the most interesting…
Market researchers complain a lot when they get data back from surveys and see that people have been “speeding” through their surveys or that people are not giving thoughtful responses. Putting aside the issue of fraud (which is a huge problem in our industry) the problem is rarely “bad respondents” – instead the problem is…
Today I saw my first “dumb election statistics” article of the season, with AP News offering this dramatically titled story: Kamala Harris’ election would defy history. Just 1 sitting VP has been elected president since 1836. We are bound to see tons of headlines and stories like this during the next several weeks. It brought…
In an essay published not too long ago, Stuart Rothenberg, a prominent political (and non-partisan) commentator argued that partisan pollsters (those who work directly for either Democratic or Republican candidates) do a better job than presumably objective third party pollsters. Why? Because they have to get it right. Their campaign strategies depend on it. Quoting…
A survey we conducted for a client this year was just vetted by CNN and we were asked to provide all kinds of detailed information about what we did and how we did it so that our client could get news coverage for the survey they commissioned. This list of 16 questions that CNN will…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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.…