Category: General Survey Stuff
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A bad survey or no survey at all?
For a whole lot of reasons that I won’t go into online privacy suddenly is front and center, not just in the research industry, but in the popular press as well. The central message is that people are “concerned,” but about what exactly and by how much, well the answers there are all over the…
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Thinking fast and slow in web survey design
I am a huge fan of Jakob Nielsen's work on web usability. He has a post out this week–"Four Dangerous Navigation Approaches that Can Increase Cognitive Strain"–that puts web usability into a system 1/system 2 framework. As I've said many times before, I believe that his research on web usaiblity has important implications for web…
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New survey says everybody has a price
Like many people in this business I've been thinking a lot about data privacy these last few weeks. So when I see a headline from Research-Live come into my email saying, "Half of consumers willing to share their data, says survey," I wonder what's up because it doesn't quite gel with other data I'm seeing.…
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Pew takes a serious look at Google Consumer Surveys
The room is full here at AAPOR and mostly I suspect to hear a presentation of Pew's comparison of the results from a dual frame (landline plus cell) telephone survey and Google Consumer Surveys. There is no shortage of people I've talked to here and elsewhere who think that Pew was overly kind in characterizing…
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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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A Literary Digest moment
Last week McKinsey released results from a study of the impact of US healthcare reform (The Affordable Care Act) on employer-provided health insurance. The report estimated that 78 million workers were likely to lose their employer provided health insurance once the law kicks in fully in 2014. This estimate is significantly at odds with other…
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Can we really do two things at once?
Like most research companies mine now routinely includes cell phones in our telephone samples. Best practice requires that before we interview someone on a cell phone we determine if it's safe to do the interview. If, for example, the respondent is driving a car we don't do the interview. Yesterday someone asked me if it…
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Zero defects: An admirable but elusive goal
Several years ago I was asked to write a chapter for a book called Methods for Testing and Evaluating Survey Questionnaires. So a couple of colleagues and I wrote something on testing online questionnaires. It led me to scratch the surface of the contemporary software testing literature where I learned that the industry had more…
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Sugging, Internet style
In the beginning we had Sugging and shortly thereafter came Frugging. (The correct capitalization on these terms has always eluded me.) Mercifully we strayed from this convention when we discovered push polls. The question before us: what should we call what newsmax.com is up to? Here is the deal. They send out survey invitations to…