The Survey Geek

Author: RegBaker

  • Thoughts on Privacy Day

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    RegBaker
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    Thursday, January 28 is Data Privacy Day, and I am reminded that roughly 25 years ago I wrote a chapter for a book in which I tried to imagine how what was then clumsily described as computer-assisted information collection (CASIC) might evolve in the decades ahead. I had just read Nicholas Negroponte’s fascinating little book,…

  • Polling Again!

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    RegBaker
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    Once again the second biggest story coming out of a US presidential election is what one commentator described as "the absolutely massive failure of political polling." Really?  Consider this. Nate Silver, relying mostly on surveys, predicted that Joe Biden would win 30 states and that the tipping point state would be Pennsylvania. He forecasted the…

  • Charting a course through the COVID-19 Pandemic

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    RegBaker
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    Two interesting pieces of research out this morning about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on research results. The first comes from Zappi and an online test of 26 concepts and advertisements across six consumer categories (personal care, food and beverage, home hygiene, Telco, QSR, OTC) in five markets (US, UK, China, Italy and Mexico).…

  • The cost of privacy

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    RegBaker
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    My email this morning included a message from Hertz describing their new fleet of BMWs. I don’t rent from Hertz anymore and the emails they continue to send are mostly reminders that my driver’s license has expired, which was some while ago. But why the BMW pitch? Perhaps because in 2009 I treated myself to…

  • Is Insights a Profession?

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    RegBaker
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    Yesterday, like 100 million or so other Americans, I tuned into the Super Bowl. I was not there to see whether the Flying Elvis would beat a team that was only there because of one of the most glaring officiating errors in the history of American football. Rather, I tuned in to hear Romostradamus, the…

  • Finding the soul of research

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    RegBaker
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    I stole the title of this post from Simon Chadwick's editorial in the November/December issue of Research World. It reminded me that I, like many young people, began my career as something of an idealist. My first two jobs were with nonprofits and then in 1984 I joined NORC at the University of Chicago, whose tagline was…

  • Big Data: Part 3

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    RegBaker
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    This post is the third and last, at least for now, on my series about MR’s struggles with big data. Its theme is simple: big data is hard. For starters, the quality of the data is not what we are accustomed to. More often than not the data were collected for some other purpose and…

  • Big Data: Part 2

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    RegBaker
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    This second post in my series about MR’s ongoing struggle with big data is focused on our stubborn resistance to the analytic techniques that are an essential part of the big data paradigm. It’s hard to talk about those analytic challenges without referring to Chris Anderson’s 2008 Wired editorial, “The end of theory: The data…

  • Big Data: Part 1

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    RegBaker
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    I have seen more than my share of MR conference presentations on big data over the last three or four years and it’s hard not to conclude that we still don’t have a clue. Sure, there have been some really good presentations on the use of non-survey data—what we might call “other data”—but most of…

  • ESOMAR Congress 2015: All behavior all the time

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    RegBaker
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    OK, so that’s a bit of an exaggeration and at a conference with as many concurrent sessions as we have here in Dublin there is a strong element of self-selection. Nonetheless, I’m coming away from these three days with an even stronger sense than I had coming in that the future of research is about…