Posts Tagged ‘Survey Design’
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010
We are currently engaged in a research project for a client in South Korea, so issues of cross-cultural communication are top-of-mind for us right now. Whether we rely on translations, or whether we speak the same language as our clients and respondents, it is important for researchers to understand differences in how people think and respond to research questions because data is always context sensitive. (more…)
Tags: bias, culture, international, Survey Design
Posted in Methods & Tools, Survey Design | No Comments »
Friday, May 14th, 2010
Choosing an omnibus survey can be a simple approach to getting survey data, because it is usually inexpensive and fast, and involves asking just a few questions. But there is sometimes a downside to simplicity: You have just a few questions to get that nugget of data you’re hoping to use as a news hook or to provide insight to your client. If your key questions are off target, you can’t turn to other content in your survey to find something usable.
Here are four tips for writing omnibus survey questions to ensure that your effort is successful: (more…)
Tags: omnibus, Public Relations, Survey Design
Posted in Omnibus Surveys, Public Polls, Public Relations, Survey Design, Survey Tips | No Comments »
Friday, April 23rd, 2010
Asking people to fill out long, tiresome, and boring surveys is a scourge of the research, polling, and survey industry. (Another is asking them to fill out a survey every time they interact with you — see There Are Too Many Surveys.) Asking people to fill out long surveys teaches them to avoid surveys in the future, and indeed we see survey participation rates continuing to decline. But more importantly if you are the one who needs to rely on survey data, long surveys result in measurably lower data quality. (more…)
Tags: Data Collection, data quality, open-ends, survey, Survey Design, survey respondents
Posted in Data Collection, Online Surveys, Survey Design, Survey Tips | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
When multiple surveys about the same topic give different results, consider yourself lucky. It provides an opportunity to dissect and understand the question you are trying to answer in a way you might not get otherwise. A recent New York Times article provides a nice example when it comes to polls about health care. (more…)
Tags: insight, survey, Survey Design
Posted in Survey Design, Turning Data into Stories | No Comments »
Thursday, March 4th, 2010
Nearly every survey begins with screening questions to ensure that only the people you are trying to reach are included in the survey. For example, if you are conducting a survey of women, you need to ask about gender and kick out the men. And because every question costs money, you want to qualify respondents quickly and terminate those who do not belong.
Here is a helpful hint: Do not actually terminate respondents until after you have asked all screening questions. (more…)
Tags: Data Collection, demographics, Survey Design, survey respondents
Posted in Data Collection, Market Research, Methods & Tools, Survey Design, Survey Tips | No Comments »
Thursday, February 18th, 2010
An article in the most recent issue of the Harvard Business Review (“Rethinking Marketing”) argues that marketing is shifting from being product-centric to being customer-centric. The old method was to develop a portfolio of products, build a team around each product, find the customers who need that product and market it to them. The emerging method is to build teams around customer relationships, continually learn about what those customers need, then design and deliver solutions to them.
Not only will this shift from product marketing to customer marketing enhance the ability of businesses to deliver value to their customers and shareholders, but it will likely help market researchers bring higher levels of value to the work they do for their clients. Why? (more…)
Tags: brand equity, brand tracking, Market Research, product marketing, research, social science, Survey Design
Posted in Future Trends, Market Research, New Products and Innovation | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
A public relations client early in my career gave this assessment of my work: “Joe is strong at highlighting problems, but what I really care about is solutions.” That was many years ago, after I left university teaching and started doing client work full time. Her words have stayed with me and deeply shaped the work that Versta does.
I was reminded of it when I came across this survey about fear of needles. It reports statistics on how many are fearful of needles and avoiding medical care as a result. But it’s a story begging for a conclusion, which the press release authors and survey designers forgot to include. It is a good example of highlighting problems, but not offering solutions. If you’re a motivated reader of that story, you can fill in the conclusion by reading the paragraph at the bottom about the sponsoring healthcare company’s business, but how many people read that, and how often does such information make it into a story picked up by the press? (more…)
Tags: Public Relations, statistics, stories, survey, Survey Design
Posted in Public Relations, Survey Design, Survey Tips, Turning Data into Stories, Uncategorized | No Comments »
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.
(more…)
Tags: Data Collection, data quality, Market Research, online, Online Surveys, Public Polls, research, survey, Survey Design, survey respondents
Posted in Data Collection, Market Research, Methods & Tools, Online Surveys, Public Polls, Survey Design, Survey Tips, Uncategorized | No Comments »
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:
(more…)
Tags: Data Collection, Internet, online, open-ends, research, survey, Survey Design, verbatims
Posted in Data Collection, Online Surveys, Survey Design, Survey Tips | No Comments »