Posts Tagged ‘Survey Design’
Saturday, January 22nd, 2011
Unless your company has a department dedicated to it, market research can be a hard sell because higher level executives may not believe in the value of research. At Versta, we have a certain sympathy with these executives. In our view, market research in and of itself has little value; it is the outcomes of research—the answers to questions—that can have value.
It is important to distinguish the two because unfortunately there is plenty of research not designed to answer important questions. Research is frequently done because someone has a nagging feeling that they need more information to make better decisions or because doing research is considered a “best practice.” Such research generates lots of data that marketing managers wonder what to do with. Not surprisingly, they and their bosses start to question the value of research.
Our advice is to do market research only after formulating specific questions and information needs and only after you have a clear idea (in writing) of what you will do with the answers to those questions. We have produced a whitepaper entitled The Art of Asking Questions (you can download it by clicking on the image) that outlines a useful process to help you formulate those questions.
The Art of Asking Questions: A White Paper from Versta Research
The key is to articulate five types of questions, including: (more…)
Tags: insight, Market Research, research, Survey Design, value
Posted in Market Research, Presenting Research, Survey Design | No Comments »
Friday, January 7th, 2011
Contrary what a methodological purist in the social sciences might recommend, we often design survey questions with scales that have no neutral midpoint or don’t know option. For example, we sometimes use scales that look like this:
Rather than this:
Or this:
Why? Because survey respondents tend to over-use neutral midpoints or don’t know options. (more…)
Tags: Survey Design
Posted in Public Polls, Survey Design, Survey Tips | Comments Off
Thursday, December 30th, 2010
The latest data from the CDC’s National Health Interview Survey show that one quarter (25%) of U.S. adults do not have land-line telephones in their homes. So if you conduct a traditional random-digit-dial (RDD) phone survey, you will automatically be excluding one quarter of the population. Does it matter, given that surveys rarely interview everyone anyway? Probably. If those 25% are different from the remaining 75% in important ways, then excluding them will skew your survey findings.
(more…)
Tags: bias, Data Collection, data quality, ethics, Market Research, phone surveys, public opinion, Public Polls, research, Sampling, Survey Design, survey respondents
Posted in Data Collection, Methods & Tools, Public Polls, Sampling | No Comments »
Thursday, December 23rd, 2010
Good data from a survey requires, among other things, thoughtful feedback from respondents. Low-quality data most often comes not from fraudulent or lazy respondents, but from well-meaning survey takers who are bored or irritated with surveys that are not user-friendly.
In this article we focus not on the unengaged respondents who may be offering up poor-quality data (which is usually our own fault) but instead ask what we can learn from survey takers who say they loved a particular survey. Why do they love good surveys, and what about them do they love? (more…)
Tags: best practices, Data Collection, data quality, Market Research, Online Surveys, Survey Design, survey respondents
Posted in Data Collection, Online Surveys, Survey Design, Survey Tips | No Comments »
Thursday, November 18th, 2010
A pet-peeve of mine is that many (way too many) market research professionals talk about “actionable insights” and I almost never know what they are talking about. I suspect most of them don’t either. The more our clients complain that research reports are sitting on shelves collecting dust, the louder every research firm starts proclaiming that it delivers actionable insights. Some even claim to have tools that, with the click of a button, deliver actionable insights right to your desktop.
Besides the ugliness of taking a verb (to act) and turning it into a noun (action) and then forcing that into an adjective (actionable), “actionable insight” just doesn’t mean much in our industry. Now we have clients with reports full of “actionable insights” collecting dust on their shelves.
In our view, the problem is that few research professionals make an explicit link in the design phase of their research between the data that will be generated, and the specific decisions that need to be made. If that link is not specified, then even if the report is rich, detailed, and full of insight, chances are it will not be used. And if it is not used, it probably was not “actionable” to begin with. (more…)
Tags: data, insight, research, research design, satisfaction research, Survey Design
Posted in Data Analysis & Analytics, Future Trends, Market Research, Survey Design, Turning Data into Stories | No Comments »
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 »