Market Research
11/3/08
In-flight surveys
A good indication that a survey is poorly designed is when it confuses two people who create surveys for a living.Such was the case on a recent flight from Atlanta to San Diego.Beth Mulligan, a fellow analyst, was sitting next to me on the plane and she asked me to take a survey because […]
By Joe FitzlerRead More
10/27/08
Another great tool…Twitter search
We blogged before about Google Trends and Google Insights, and now there is another online tool to add to your repertoire. Twitter Search allows you see what the masses of microbloggers are saying about you, your brand, or anything else you can imagine. Another great way to get a pulse of what is being said […]
By David KennedyRead More
10/17/08
Ethnography as it should be
This is the fifth in a series of posts on our recent trip to Africa. To see our other posts, click here. While in South Africa, we stayed at a classic game lodge. We ate impala at night and we slept in a tent (albeit the most luxurious tent I’ve ever seen), and in the […]
By Kevin RainesRead 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
10/10/08
Safaris and girls, girls and safaris
This is the fourth in a series of posts on our recent trip to Africa. To see our other posts, click here. This is a random observation, but we couldn’t miss it. During part of our vacation, we went to a game lodge in South Africa. While there was certainly a variety of household types and family types going […]
By Kevin RainesRead 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
9/26/08
Customer service and the little things
This is the second in a series of posts on our recent trip to Africa. To see our initial post, click here. One thing that’s nice about traveling is being out with the public. As researchers, we’re natural peoplewatchers, and this helps us with research designs when we’re back at our desks. Our first interesting […]
By Kevin RainesRead More
9/22/08
Who Uses the Internet? (Part 1: State by State)
Who can’t answer your Internet survey? Who is unable to view your spiffy new website? Who won’t be reached by your email newsletter? In survey research, we call the answer to these questions coverage error or the proportion of individuals in your population of interest who are unable to be sampled/reached. Although it’s a statistical concept, […]
By Geoff UrlandRead More