Author: RegBaker
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The real lessons from US electoral polling
There has been a lot of buzz in MR circles about US electoral polling and especially the summary of accuracy of the polls produced by Nate Silver. As I wrote in this blog at the time Nate's piece appeared it's only natural for researchers to zero in on data collection methodology and that's pretty much…
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Accuracy of US election polls
Nate Silver does a nice job this morning of summarizing the accuracy of and bias in the 2012 results of the 23 most prolific polling firms. I’ve copied his table below. Before we look at it we need to remember that there is more involved in these numbers than different sampling methods. The target population…
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Representativiteit is dood, lang leve representativiteit!
I'm in Amsterdam where for the last two days I've attended an ESOMAR conference that began as a panels conference in 2005, morphed into an online conference in 2009 and became 3D (a reference to a broader set of themes for digital data collection) in 2011. This conference has a longstanding reputation for exploring the…
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The US election and the #NewMR
One of the most interesting side stories of the US election (at least for a survey geek) is the inconsistency in the polls. In part that's due to there being so many of them and with that proliferation has come what we might call some thinning out of polling expertise. But when a venerable polling…
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Norman doors and online questionnaire design
In usability circles the doors in the pictures on the right are called “Norman doors.” Their named for Donald Norman who wrote a fascinating little book called, The Design of Everyday Things. In the book Norman talks a great deal about affordances, that is, properties of objects that help us to do things with them. …
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The death of MR postponed
Twice in the same week I have seen a version of this quote about Big Data: "Data is about 'how many' and 'how much', whereas research is about 'why' – you have to join it all up." First from this very thoughtful ESOMAR paper by Pieter-Paul Verheggen and Wim von Slooten and now from Clive…
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Repealing Reg’s law
While I recognize that it’s not very fashionable to complain about being quoted out of context in this era of “You didn’t build that” I’m going to take a run at it nonetheless. Back on July 12 in a post about the MRMW Conference I noted that we are moving into an era when data…
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Does evidence still matter?
Laast week there was an interview of sorts with Gayle Fuguitt on Research-Live. At one point she says: "We did some work asking our management what they were looking for from us and one of the points they raised was the issue of speed versus precision. The point wasn’t that they didn’t want precision; the…