The Survey Geek

Author: RegBaker

  • MRS Annual Conference

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    RegBaker
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    Last week I spent two days at the MRS Annual Conference in London.  The MRS has just changed its logo which now features the words, "Evidence Matters." I took that to be a reaction to a decade of emphasis on "insight" which at times seemed to translate to "evidence optional" or at least given us…

  • The latest online panel dust up

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    RegBaker
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    Gregg Peterson's post earlier this week on this blog about the Panel of Panelists at the CASRO Online Conference created quite a stir. I saw an unusual number of pageviews, there was a fair amount of retweeting of the link and other industry commentators worked a similar theme. It came on the heels of Ron…

  • The end of “don’t ask, don’t tell” in online survey research?

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    RegBaker
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    My colleague, Gregg Peterson, attended last week's CASRO Online Research Conference and has sent me this post. The era of "don't ask, don't tell" in the world of commercial market research may well have ended last week in Las Vegas at the annual CASRO Online Research Conference.    The purveyors of online surveyors came face-to-face with…

  • MR is not doomed, at least not yet

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    RegBaker
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    It’s Friday, an often slow day to start, and like many other people here in southeastern Michigan where I live I’m holed up at home with a  backpack full of work I brought home last night in anticipation of the crippling snow storm that was widely predicted but never came.  Catching up on my reading…

  • The bottom line on online sample routers

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    RegBaker
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    So what's the bottom line? I don't think we need to fear routing. Routing is essentially about automating and systematizing what panel companies have been doing for a decade. While some vendors are working on ways to claim greater representivity by the questions they ask in their screeners that's really a separate issue from routing.…

  • The problem of router bias

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    RegBaker
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    Everyone worries about router bias and it's not clear that anyone has figured out how to deal with it. At its core it seems to come down to the priority given to one survey over others and how that impacts the samples delivered to all of those other surveys. Before panels we drew samples that…

  • Respondents in routers

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    RegBaker
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    The heart of routing is screening respondents. Conceptually, routing involves amassing all of the screening questions of waiting surveys (of which there typically are hundreds) and packaging them in a way that they can be efficiently administered while minimizing the chances that a respondent gets routed to a survey and then fails to qualify.  Some…

  • Let’s have a look at online sample routers

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    RegBaker
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    A couple of weeks back I moderated about a four hour discussion on online sample routers sponsored by the ARF's Foundations of Quality research initiative. The current focus of the initiative is development of a research agenda that touches on the key dimensions of online research. The role of sample routers and how they may…

  • Plus ça change – Part 2

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    RegBaker
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    Back in December I wrote the first of two posts noting the way in which some trends in our industry can rise and fall and then rise up again with all of the same promise, problems and fears. I noted the way in which the issues surround CRM and data mining seem to be having…

  • ISO 20252 – Market, opinion and social research

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    RegBaker
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    In December we were audited for ISO compliance. After a week of staff interviews, project reviews and records inspections we were certified to the 20252 standard. Good for us! Now I recognize that there are more than few people in the industry who think ISO certification is some kind of retro thing that does not…