Dealing with Lazy Survey Respondents — Drop Them or Keep Them?
It might seem obvious that inattentive survey respondents should deleted from your data. Think again. Here’s why a “light touch” during data quality review is best.
How to Measure Brand Authenticity
This article outlines the six measurable dimensions of brand authenticity — established in academic research — that you should include in any survey of brand authenticity.
How to Test Knowledge and Misperceptions on a Survey
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…
Are They Cheating or Helping? New Research on Survey “Cheating” Raises Thorny Issue
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…
How to Fix a McKinsey Survey: 10 Best Practices They Should Have Followed
Last week we showed you a survey that might convince you to think twice about hiring a super high-end consulting firm for your survey research and insights. Fancy business consultants may know a lot about business, but they know little about gathering good data to answer their business questions. So this week, instead of focusing…
This is What a McKinsey Survey Looks Like
Ever wonder what you get if you hire a fancy schmancy consulting firm for your survey research and marketing insights, instead of Versta Research? Every once in a while we have a potential client who insists: “Give us IBM! Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” I got a view into what those surveys look…
Survey Respondent Demand Is Outpacing Supply: That’s Why Your Research Might Be Failing
The COVID-19 pandemic decimated the research industry’s respondent panels, and here’s the impact it is having on our (and your) research today. All of a sudden, research came to a halt in early 2020. Clients wanted their fieldwork put on hold for six months or more. Panel companies stopped investing in and nurturing their panels.…
Finding Fraud in Public Polls: Our AAPOR Presentation
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…
The Rigors of Good Research: Three Examples from Thought Leadership
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.…
Here’s Why You Should “Punish Test” Your Surveys
Testing a survey before it launches takes about 4 to 6 hours of an experienced professional’s time, for a standard ten- to fifteen-minute survey. If you don’t invest that time up front, you are almost certain to discover mistakes while in the field (or worse: after), which can make for a nightmare of programming corrections…