Resources for the Research Community
If you were to ask me what my favorite pastime is, I’d have to say people-watching. No surprise, I am market researcher! Observing people and their interactions with one another can be a great source of inspiration and entertainment. With that in mind, I recently attended my first focus group excited to study our core [...]
The biggest mistake which almost every online panel company does is to overlook the critical importance of respondent satisfaction. But we provide adequate incentives for their time & effort! I have often heard panel managers protesting. Let us first get this thing straight – your incentives are really not that lucrative enough that someone will [...]
I recently attended a great workshop on innovation that was put on by, of all things, a health insurance company. While there’s plenty of room for innovation for products and services in the healthcare industry, sometimes innovating within a particular piece of that industry, like insurance, can seem a bit daunting. For most of us, [...]
As researchers, and as students of social science, we must never forget that attitudes are not fixed constructs to be unearthed. By their very nature, they are ephemeral, and they are in many ways created in response to social signals. Recent legal and political developments here in the U.S. have brought that point home for [...]
Perhaps you assume the problem of misinterpreting data is confined to the “great unwashed.” Well, there was recently an incident of data confusion by none other than the Chief Justice of the United States, John Roberts. According to an article in the Boston Globe, during oral arguments on a case challenging the Voting Rights Act, [...]
When designing international research, what do you use as your demographic guideposts? In most cases, the answer is statistics that in some way can be traced back to the national statistical agencies of foreign governments. But how reliable are those data? There’s an eye-opening article in the February 25, 2013 issue of the New Yorker. [...]
It’s funny how history repeats itself. Back in the year 2000, I was a sales representative for a company called Greenfield Online. At that time, nearly all market research was being done by telephone. Greenfield was a pioneer in the use of online surveys, and specifically the use of online panels for market research. In [...]
David Brooks wrote an interesting piece for the New York Times recently entitled, “The Philosophy of Data.” Since the NYT has a pay wall, let me give you the essence of what Brooks had to say. He muses on the rise of what he calls “data-ism,” the assumption that because we can gather huge amounts [...]
Buzzwords alone don’t make a successful business. Remember back during the dot com bubble, when all a company seemingly needed to do was add “e” to the beginning of its name to get an avalanche of investment capital? Well, those days haven’t quite returned. However, human nature has not changed in the decade since the [...]
Regardless of which team you may have supported in the recent Super Bowl, or whether you are a sports fan at all, there was an interesting technology story to come out of the New Orleans contest, won by the Baltimore Ravens over the San Francisco 49ers. Mashable reported that the Ravens use iPad technology to [...]
