Latest Articles
Hey there…have you heard of me?
In consumer and B2B market research circles we are often asked to assess market awareness and/or familiarity with brands, products and spokespeople or causes. These two related, but separate constructs, represent the first steps on the pathway from prospect to customer. Awareness should be measured in two ways – unaided and aided. Unaided awareness is […]
Census Regions – What it means for Hispanic Sample
Census regions are probably the last thing you think about when procuring Hispanic sample. Language, acculturation, and country of origin are likely at the top of your list. However, census regions are linked to all of the above. The Hispanic population distribution in the U.S. is considerably different than the rest of the population. For […]
Sampling and Other Considerations for Mobile Research
In a prior post I highlighted an interesting statistic – for any given project market researchers can now expect up to 40% response on smartphones. This percentage will continue to increase. The question then becomes one of what do we know about mobile responders and can this be applied to our sampling plans? First and […]
Three keys for designing effective mobile surveys
At the recent MRA Corporate Researchers Conference the training organization Research Rockstar presented a course on designing device agnostic surveys. The trend is clear that more and more surveys are being taken on smartphones and tablets. Desktop computers still account for the majority of responses, but for any given project market researchers can now expect […]
Top 2 Box Score – Avoid the Pitfall
Recently when giving my desk a much needed cleaning I came across an article by Jerry Thomas with the firm Decision Analyst. His whitepaper focused on the use of the top two box score as a measure for conveying scores to survey scales. The top box score is the sum of percentages for the top […]
More from Research Access
“How To” Posts
Survey Fail
We’re counting down our Top 10 blog posts of 2013. Coming in at #1 is this Buzzfeed-inspired piece originally published August 10. A friendly reminder that you should always have someone else review your questionnaire. You don’t want to commit the great acts of survey fail that these survey authors did. 10. Make sure your […]
Order Bias Is a Larger Source of Error Than You Think
Last week I was writing a questionnaire for a client using their survey software account, and I was chagrined to discover that it lacked the ability to randomize the display of items in a choice list. This is a common capability of all modern survey software applications, including QuestionPro, Survey Analytics, Google Consumer Surveys, and […]
Use Multiple Text Boxes for More Productive Respondents
A perennial problem with open-ended survey questions is that respondents are lazy. It takes time and effort to think of good answers. And if the survey is self-administered online or on paper, it takes time and effort to write them out. But there are several things a savvy researcher can do. One of them is […]
Four Collaborative Steps to Innovation
Open innovation is the practice of collecting data from a wide audience in order to solve problems or evolve. And this practice is being utilized in every industry, from government to nonprofits to enterprise-level companies to universities, with numerous different end goals and objectives. Marketers are using it for research, product managers are using it […]
Determining Price: The van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter
Determining the best price for a product or service is a common marketing research question. I usually start my conversation with a client asking whether their product has all of its features set or if they also need to test a range of features other than price. If they are testing variable features in addition […]
Exaggerated Self-reporting of Mobile Phone Use
We asked some of our favorite bloggers to provide us a “lost gem” – a great article that deserved wider response than it received the first time it was published. This piece by Ashley Richards was originally published June 27 for Survey Post. A recent article in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication examines the accuracy of self-reported […]
Ask Me No Leading Questions, and I’ll Tell You No Lies
The most common problem with the draft questionnaires that are sent to me is the use of leading questions. A leading question suggests the answer the survey author is looking for and often unintentionally reflects the author’s bias. As a result, the answers to such questions overstate actual support for the item being researched. Leading […]
10 Tips for Mobile Diary Studies
Earlier this month, Chris Neal of Chadwick Martin Bailey shared with members of the New England chapter of the Marketing Research Association tips for running mobile diary studies, based on lessons learned from a recent project. For the Council of Research Excellence, CMB studied mobile video usage to understand: How much time is spent on […]
7 Secrets to Designing a Great Usability Test
Usability testing is a great way to get a close-up look at your audience’s perceptions and expectations, but if you don’t have a lot of experience setting up user tests it’s easy to make mistakes or simply leave things out. Doing so undercuts the value of your testing and wastes both your time and that […]
The ABCs of CSAT
Later this week I’ll be attending the Net Promoter Conference in San Francisco. I’m really looking covering this event for Research Access. Customer satisfaction (or CSAT) measurement is a highly specialized, but vitally important, part of the research world. Yet I think there are many researchers and marketers who aren’t terribly familiar with the ins and outs […]
4 Kinds of Survey Error: Sampling, Measurement, Coverage and Non-Response
There are 4 generally-accepted types of survey error. By survey error, I mean factors which reduce the accuracy of a survey estimate. It’s important to keep each type of survey error in mind when designing, executing and interpreting surveys. However, I suspect some of them are more ingrained in our thinking about research, while others […]
