Versta Research Post

Pigeons Beat People on Probability Problems

The hardest part of quantitative market research is not that it involves numbers, math, or even statistics, but that it involves complex problems in probability. Over the past several years, psychologists have been documenting how difficult it is for us humans to solve even “simple” probability problems.  One fascinating example is a puzzle known as…

Versta Research Post

Top 5 Picks: Best Articles on Market Research

Versta Research just hit a magic number: 100.  That’s the number of articles we have written to help our clients and their colleagues keep abreast of important trends in market research.  If your market research supplier is not providing ongoing thought leadership in design, methods, and analytics, then what are the chances they are bringing…

Versta Research Post

How Data Can Highlight Mistakes

We are often surprised by the number of senior researchers in the market research industry who never touch raw data.  Often they don’t even have the tools, since “data processing” is outsourced to lower levels or other countries.  It is surprising because we almost always engage in work where getting into the data and puzzling…

Versta Research Post

Advice for PR Surveys: Avoid Numeric Scales

As much as we love numbers, we find ourselves often advising clients against using numeric scales in their surveys.  A numeric scale is any response format that asks people to give a number within a certain range to indicate the strength of their feeling or opinion.  The insanely popular survey question used to calculate Net…

Versta Research Post

Killer Quotes from Research Respondents

One way you can make a research report really pop is to carefully select and edit quotes from the people involved in the study.  For qualitative research, that means pulling quotes from transcripts of in-depth interviews, focus groups, online bulletin boards, social media, etc.  For survey research, it means pulling quotes from open-ended questions that…