Here is a helpful hint: Do not actually terminate respondents until after you have asked all screening questions.  Suppose you’re trying to reach women over age 30 who own dogs.  You’ll need three screening questions: gender, age, and dog ownership.  First you ask gender.  It’s tempting to have men immediately discontinue, and then after asking age have all those under 30 discontinue, and so on.  Do not do this.  Ask gender, age, and dog ownership of everyone.  You don’t need men in your survey, but knowing their age and whether they own dogs may be useful to you.  Likewise, you don’t need young women, but knowing whether they own dogs may be useful.  We see two common scenarios in which this information becomes extremely useful:

1.  You complete the study, present the findings, and somebody asks, “What if we expand our market to men?”  Having complete screening data lets you estimate how many men there over age 30 who own dogs, which is an important piece of exploring whether to expand the market.

2.  You decide to expand your target group while still in the field, which means relaxing the requirements of who qualifies for the survey.  “Let’s open up our survey to allow women who are age 25 and over,” your client suddenly says.  Having complete screening data tells you in advance how many more women will qualify for the survey and helps you estimate in advance the potential cost and benefit of relaxing this criterion.

Programming a survey to do this is easy, but unfortunately most people don’t.  Give your programmer clear instructions.  The additional cost of asking all screening questions to all respondents who want to take the survey is minimal, and the benefits are potentially huge.  It’s a smarter way to screen respondents.

Need additional help?  Versta Research would be happy to review your survey and assist in any way we can.

—Joe Hopper, Ph.D.

While the Census provides basic tabulations and counts on its website, you can also query the data yourself to answer specific, customized questions that you are unable to find otherwise.  In fact, using this data is so easy that Versta no longer uses the Census’ rather difficult and ever-changing “fact finder” features.  We have downloaded the data along with a codebook, and use a statistics program to run specific queries and counts of anything we need.

Want to know how many single mothers there are between the ages of 40 and 45, with four children living at home?  We can tell you.  We recently had a client who was having a hard time finding the percentage of people in the U.S. age 40 and over.  With the data from the census at our fingertips, it took just a few minutes to get this number, and ship off the answer to our client.

Versta Research Report Using Census Data

The data (called the Public Use Microdata Sample, or PUMS) is available to anyone, for free.  You’ll need a decent database, spreadsheet, or statistics program work to with it (we use SPSS).  Or, to get the exact information you are looking for, contact Versta Research and we can help.

Here is a partial list of attributes covered in the data:

• Age
• Ancestry
• Disability status
• Educational attainment
• Fertility
• Hispanic origin
• Hours worked
• Income
• Industry
• Location
• Marital status
• Mobility status
• Occupation
• Race
• Sex
• Family, subfamily, and household relationships
• Mortgage status and selected monthly owner costs
• Presence and age of own children
• Property value

–Joe Hopper, Ph.D.