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Tag Archives: public polls

How Polls Pass CNN’s Quality Review

How Polls Pass CNN’s Quality Review

Public Polling, Public RelationsBy Joe HopperAugust 21, 2019

This list of 16 questions that CNN will ask before they are willing to publish your polling data is worth reading because somebody at CNN clearly knows their stuff. It is far better than anything I have seen from the New York Times, and it is far better than what the Associated Press (AP) sets…

A Christmas for Research Nerds

A Christmas for Research Nerds

Data Collection, Funnies, Public PollingBy Joe HopperDecember 24, 2018

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%

Response Rates for Phone Surveys Plummet to 1%

Data Collection, Public Polling, SamplingBy Joe HopperOctober 10, 2018

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

Nine Ways to Rescue a Failing Phone Survey

Data Collection, Public PollingBy Joe HopperSeptember 19, 2018

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…

Polling Trends on Food, Biotechnology, and More

Polling Trends on Food, Biotechnology, and More

Public Polling, Topics in MarketingBy Joe HopperSeptember 12, 2018

Every client we have—no matter what industry—will find something important to think about in looking at polling data on food. These polls touch on some of the “universal” questions we ask in market research, such as: How much do consumers trust the safety of products they buy? How much do they trust the companies that…

Beware Bad Sample from Crowdsourcing

Beware Bad Sample from Crowdsourcing

Data Collection, Public Polling, SamplingBy Joe HopperAugust 29, 2018

Oddly enough, the researchers who most prize scientific rigor (our research colleagues in academia) are the last to have realized that online sampling can be treacherous. An article published in Wired magazine last week describes academic psychologists as “freaking out” because they just learned that a lot of their data, which they source from Amazon’s…

Why You Should Feel Patriotic Pride in Census Data

Why You Should Feel Patriotic Pride in Census Data

Public Polling, Resources and Recommendations, SamplingBy Joe HopperJuly 4, 2018

Do you ever feel a little glow of patriotic pride in your research work? At Versta Research we sometimes do. Here’s why: the United States of America gives us and you—all free, and all easily accessible—one of the most amazing, useful resources available to every person and every business and every researcher: Census Data. It…

Three Easy Lessons from a Bad New York Times Survey

Three Easy Lessons from a Bad New York Times Survey

Data Analysis & Analytics, Public Polling, Sampling, Survey DesignBy Joe HopperMay 9, 2018

Surveys don’t get much simpler than this. It is from the New York Times, which I typically admire for its rigorous reporting, thoughtful analysis, and forward-thinking experimentation with data visualization. But even with such simplicity, this survey (published on April 22, 2018) manages to be terrible in at least three big ways: It asks a…

How to Fix Your Education Bias in Surveys

Data Analysis & Analytics, Sampling, Survey DesignBy Joe HopperMay 2, 2018

How many people do you think are college-educated in the United States? If you’re like most clients we work for (whose family members, friends and co-workers nearly all have college degrees) you will substantially over-estimate that number. The answer is a mere 29%. If you include associate’s degrees, then it goes up to 37%. These…

More Evidence that Online Polls Work (Really Well)

Data Analysis & Analytics, Methods & Tools, Public PollingBy Joe HopperApril 25, 2018

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…

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