Posts Tagged ‘online’

Top Trends of the Decade: Looking Back

Thursday, December 31st, 2009

As an industry driven by data and information, market research and public opinion polling has seen dramatic changes in the last ten years and will no doubt change quickly and in big ways during the next ten.

Looking back, here are what we consider to be the five biggest changes that shaped current challenges faced by market research and opinion polling: (more…)

Better Data through Better Survey Design

Monday, September 14th, 2009

Market researchers complain a lot when they get data back from surveys and see that people have been “speeding” through their surveys or that people are not giving thoughtful responses.

But the problem is rarely “bad respondents” – instead the problem is lazy researchers.  When people discover that the survey they just agreed to take is boring, tedious, repetitive, or too long, they either quit altogether or they stop providing good answers.

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Online Surveys Replacing Focus Groups

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

It’s fascinating that new survey technology and easy access to millions of consumers could be affecting the focus group industry more than the quantitative survey industry.  But a colleague who has been doing focus groups for over 20 years says that’s exactly what she is seeing.

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Three Ways to Improve Online Verbatim Data

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

Good open-ended questions and thoughtful responses to these questions can yield amazingly rich and insightful data.  But given the generally poor quality of responses to open-ended question in mail surveys, some have speculated that open-ended questions in online surveys would suffer a similar fate.

Research seems to show this is not the case.  Further, a study just published in the Summer 2009 issue of Public Opinion Quarterly outlines three ways that we can improve the quality of responses in on-line surveys:

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