With the summer season upon us, along comes a most welcomed relief for many market research project managers. The workload slows and creates a great opportunity to take care of… Continue reading Market Research Strategies: Summertime Activity for Survey Writers
We all know what the most common survey design mistakes are: having surveys that are too long, too onerous, or that have questions that are leading or biased in some… Continue reading Three Common Survey Design Mistakes You Can Avoid
If you are tracking customer satisfaction at regular intervals, say quarterly or monthly, you may have found that your colleagues want explanations for every increase or decrease in scores—even minor… Continue reading Customer Satisfaction Survey Results: Jumping To Conclusions
Let’s get a few facts on the table, shall we? We all have non-researcher friends, colleagues and acquaintances who are writing their own online surveys using one of the many… Continue reading Survey Design 2011: NEW REALITY, NEW RULES
Once you have taken the time to craft a fantastic questionnaire, the challenge becomes: how do you get people to actually take it? Of course, having a great list (or… Continue reading Please Take My Survey: Getting People to Accept Your Invitation
We get a lot of questions from people evaluating online survey platforms. And given that there are now more than 50 options available (see partial list at the end of this article), it is a bit confusing. Before you start evaluating options, consider these checklist items:
Even if a market research project produces a pile of perfect data, we still face the fundamental challenge of analysis — making sure that we’re analyzing the results comprehensively and objectively. In other words, without bias.
Let’s say you’ve done an online survey. You identified your objectives, thought carefully about sampling, and designed a great questionnaire. You monitored data collection and carefully cleaned your dataset. Even after all this painstaking work, risk still exists. You still have to analyze the data, and it’s here that unexpected errors often creep in.
Typically when we think about market research surveys, we think of questionnaires that have 20, 30, or even more questions. Getting qualified people to complete these questionnaires has become a serious challenge. One alternative is the single-question poll. After all, you’re much more likely to get high response and low dropout rates if you can simply say, “Hi, we have a single question we’d like your opinion on”, rather than requesting a novel’s worth of responses.
Facebook is making polling insanely easy these days…
To be frank, my opinion on this topic has changed in just the past year or two. Before then, I was an ardent believer that all research must by anonymous—no matter what. I felt that any direct follow-up would show research participants that their survey responses could result in unexpected communications—and even if “helpful”, this experience could still impact future willingness to participate in research.
In your organization, what happens when someone proposes a market research study?
* Do people roll their eyes?
* Do people perceive it as a decision making delay tactic?
* Do people readily volunteer to be involved in designing the project?
* Do any executive-level folks readily endorse the idea?
