Which of these two questions do you find more annoying, question A or question B? A. Foodie TV has announced a competition to select the best destination for food. What can your city do to win? B. In terms of the restaurant choices, what is important for a city to offer? Now which of these…
If you are a market research professional, I urge you to look for continuing education beyond the MR industry groups such as the Insights Association, Quirk’s, etc. and instead look to a more academic organization like AAPOR, the American Association for Public Opinion Research. Yes, their conferences will be the most boring you ever attend.…
At first I thought this was the dumbest survey question ever. Why ask people what device they are using to take the survey, when you know from the platform meta-data what device they are using? Yes, even lame self-service survey platforms can (and should be) capturing information about device, operating system, IP address, start time,…
It was so weird, right after the election, to see a media frenzy heaping praise and attention on the one poll that got it wrong. The USC/LA Times poll predicted a Trump win, with 47% of voters choosing Trump and 44% choosing Clinton. Right after the election, media headlines trumpeted its success: “How One Pollster…
It bugs me that companies would use customer feedback surveys not for information or learning, but to manipulate customers into buying from them again. On the other hand, how many companies inundate us with those zillions of customer satisfaction surveys because they truly care about learning? What they really care about are their “metrics,” their…
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.…
I have been surprised by the number of people—including friends and even veteran researchers within the market research industry—who believe that the outcome of the 2016 presidential election proved once and for all that surveys and polling do not work. Why am I surprised? Because it is simply not true. In the Versta Research Winter…
The thing I love about strategists is that they know exactly what they want. By the time they come to us, they have analyzed their business needs. They have figured out what kinds of data will help them make decisions. They know why they want research, how they are going to use it, and how…
Using surveys to “quiz” people about their knowledge (versus asking them about their attitudes or behaviors) is tricky. First, online surveys make it easy for people to look up answers they may not otherwise know. Second, people want to get quiz answers right, and so they are motivated to cheat. This is the reason I…
One of the “best practices” for survey research I learned in graduate school and then early in my career is this: Survey measurement scales should have at least five points. Presumably that provides enough room for variation, and it provides a neutral midpoint as well. But it is not true. Or, like all best practices,…