Quantitative Research
2/18/09
Seth’s five tips for better online surveys
How to improve online surveys? Ask anyone that creates or takes surveys and you’ll probably get an opinion. We’ve even chimed in on the topic in the past. (And on another Seth post.) Seth Godin recently posted Five tips for better online surveys, and, as usual, we have our own two cents to contribute. 1. Every […]
By David KennedyRead More
1/27/09
What are we weighting for?
Let’s say that you just conducted a public survey of your community for a community needs assessment. In your community, 29% of residents are between age 18 and 34, and 29% are age 55 or older. Yet among your survey respondents, 8% are aged 18-34, while 52% are aged 55 or older (this is a […]
By Beth MulliganRead More
1/19/09
Tradeoffs between survey length and cooperation
In a previous post we discussed how survey length can indirectly drive up participation recruitment costs. Another often-ignored consequence of long surveys is poor quality data that may or may not be easy to identify. Even conscientious participants lose the desire to be cooperative as a survey drags on. By the sixth page, or the […]
By Beth MulliganRead More
1/12/09
The not so ultimate question?
In a recent edition of Quirk’s Marketing Research Review, there was an article (Article ID: 20081004….requires registration, but it is free) on the Net Promoter Score (NPS). The NPS has long been touted by many as the best way to measure customer satisfaction, and a key characteristic of the system is its simplicity. In case you […]
By David KennedyRead More
1/8/09
Knowing your audience
One of the basic tenets of effective marketing is knowing your target market. That principle is no less important, and may be even more so, when designing effective market research. Whether your goal is to encourage people to use your product or service or to encourage them to participate in your study, knowing what motivates […]
By Matt HerndonRead More
11/20/08
Long surveys
I heard the following conversation a few nights ago while on the bus ride home between the bus driver and a passenger regarding a survey that RTD was administering to a few riders on each bus. “That survey was like a book.” “It even had chapters.” “I think they get paid by the question.” Of […]
By David KennedyRead More
10/13/08
18 Steps to preventing and catching online cheaters
In a recent post, I talked about the problem of professional respondents, and specifically people who cheat to earn their incentive. At the end of the post, I posed the question, “what can we do?” Here I provide some basics on how to ensure the quality of your online data. Survey Design Screeners. Screeners shouldn’t […]
By David KennedyRead More
10/6/08
Professional survey respondents
We get a lot of inquiries about how to join our panel or participate in our focus groups, and consequently we spend a lot of time explaining that we don’t maintain this kind of recruiting list for participants. (We custom recruit for almost all our groups. We’ll explain why below.) Some questions come from people […]
By David KennedyRead More
10/3/08
The importance of “other” both here and in Madagascar
This is the third in a series of posts on our recent trip to Africa. To see our first two posts, click here and here. We checked into a hotel in Antananarivo, and I was delighted to see that the Malagasy people embrace market research. Inside our room was a customer service survey asking about […]
By Kevin RainesRead More
10/1/08
Who Uses the Internet? (Part 2: Demographics)
Part one of our examination of who uses the Internet looked at the question geographically. In part two, we’ll look at Internet usage nationwide (data again via the NTIA) broken down by several important demographic variables. In all of the graphs that follow, in-home Internet usage (green portion of the bars) and outside of the […]
By Geoff UrlandRead More