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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
Sure we laugh at those ridiculously biased fundraising “surveys” from politicians. But for some reason, the poorly (but more cleverly) designed surveys put out by corporate PR departments often get a pass. Even worse, they sometimes get tons of visibility in both mainstream press and social media. I saw one such survey a few weeks…
Here is an update on what went wrong with the Clinton vs. Trump polling debacle last fall, according to AAPOR’s official Evaluation of 2016 Election Polls in the U.S. that was released several weeks ago. The conclusions are based on an analysis and assessment of publicly available polling data plus additional data supplied by top…
If you conduct a well-designed, well-executed survey of 500 people you probably think (and yes, we may have told you) that your margin of error is ±4%. It’s beautiful. It’s all based on math. And if you ever had that “aha” moment in statistics class, you probably agree that the mathematical proof of it is…
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…