Author: RegBaker
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Let’s ban the R word
While working on a paper over the weekend it suddenly hit me that "necessary but not sufficient" is the perfect way to describe the whole array of techniques that have emerged over the last few years in the name of improving panel data quality. Not to be confused with the Goldratt "business novel" (now there's…
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Still feeling our way
In my last post I promised some short updates on the just-concluded ESOMAR Congress in Athens. Then my family and I set off on a driving vacation around the Peloponnese where thoughts of MR and the Congress quickly drifted away. I was reminded of this when the morning's email included a note from a colleague…
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Privacy continues be a major issue for our industry
This the first of what I hope to be a (short) series of posts from the ESOMAR Congress in Athens. The theme, not surprisingly, is Odyssey: The Changing Face of Market Research. The change part of that tile refers to the double challenge of (1) an onslaught of new methods and (2) the still difficult…
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Balancing risk and reward in survey incentives
The current issue of Survey Practice has an interesting little piece on the use of lottery incentives in online surveys. (Here I quickly point out that the correct terminology should be "sweepstakes" since there are legal issues around anyone but governmental entities running lotteries, but let's not get distracted by that.) In self-administered surveys like…
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More signs of the Apolcalypse
Way back in the last century when Web interviewing was just starting to warm up more than one researcher worried that with the Web as a research medium anybody could create and field a survey. You didn't need a mail room, a call center, or a field force anymore. In 1999, those fears were made…
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Mastery, Mystery, and Misery
Well over a decade ago when we first started doing Web surveys I had an on again, off again argument with colleague who used to say, "A Web survey should look like a Web site." My counter was that motivations of site visitors are different from those of survey respondents. Site visitors come of their…
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Are we there yet?
The August issue of Inside Research has one of their periodic reports from their Buyer's Roundtable. The August topic: Will Listening Trump Asking? The answer seems to lie somewhere between 'Maybe Someday' and 'Probably Not.' Since this is a qual group of N=25 I'll go right to some verbatims: "The nature of the data does…
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Insight
Tom Ewing's Blackbeard blog has a neat little post on the meaning of insight, one of those words that everybody likes to talk about as the main goal of research but no one is quite sure just what it means. Tom puts into terms we all can understand. He writes: You know it when you…
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So much for robopolls
For about the last week or so I have been getting regular calls on my home answering machine from Governor Mike Huckabee whom I gather is once again running for President. While it seems to be the Governor's voice it also is a recording inviting me to do a survey by IVR. Somewhere back in…