Category: General Survey Stuff
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Getting straight on response rates
AAPOR's Standard Definitions: Final Dispositions of Case Codes and Outcome Rates for Surveys has long been the bible for survey researchers interested in systematically tracking response and nonresponse in surveys and summarizing those outcomes in standardized ways that help us judge the strengths and weaknesses of survey results. The first edition, published in 1998, built…
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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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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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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…
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Where is our Copernicus?
I was at the AAPOR Conference in Chicago most of last week and while I had planned to do some blogging it was hard given the sheer overwhelming amount of information, opinions, and data being shared. (And besides, Jeffry Henning was there pounding out posts on his shiny new iPad so I am confident the…
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A recommendation
One of the links over there on the right is to useit.com where usability guru Jakob Nielsen regularly holds forth on usability issues of all kinds. You can sign up to get regular email alerts to his Alert Box feature and it's one of these recent alerts that caused me to write this post. At…
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You can thank me later
Back in January I commented on a piece by Chang and Krosnick that had been published in Public Opinion Quarterly. Shortly thereafter I got an email from Michelle Rawling at POQ telling me that they had unlocked the article so that non-subscribers could get access to the whole piece. Here is the link. She also…