The Survey Geek

Category: Miscellaneous

  • Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas

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    RegBaker
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    Brian Singh has a post over on GreenBook that gives us his take on a recent conference where a group of venture capitalists shared their views on the investment opportunities in MR as it grapples with its future.  I didn’t find most of what Brian reported to be surprising; it’s pretty much the standard stuff…

  • The real lessons from US electoral polling

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    RegBaker
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    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…

  • The US election and the #NewMR

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    RegBaker
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    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…

  • Final thoughts on MRMW

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    RegBaker
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    In the final session of last’s week MRMW Conference chair Lenny Murphy asked me to share my three takeaways from the conference.  Here is more or less what I told him. First, if you are in the data collection business find a new business.  It’s clear that the sheer amount of data available is going…

  • Tracking at the speed of light –or thereabouts

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    RegBaker
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    I have this Epson projector and the bulb is getting flakey.  So yesterday I went online to order a new one.  I looked around to get a good price and visited a site by a company that seems to specialize in such bulbs: Pureland Supply.  But I ended up buying direct from Epson. Today I…

  • What skills does a market researcher need?

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    RegBaker
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    My inaugural post on this blog was on August 28, 2005.  I started the blog as a way to share information inside my company.  In those days posts were almost always true to the tagline and focused on surveys.  But times change and today the MR industry is nowhere near as focused on surveys as…

  • Mail survey renaissance?

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    RegBaker
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    In today's technology-driven MR industry it feels beyond retro to even mention mail surveys. Yet in the broader research industry and specifically the sector that deals with social policy research mail surveys are experiencing a major resurgence. The problems of coverage and nonresponse in telephone surveys that have driven MR online are driving social policy…

  • CASRO Online Conference: Day 2

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    RegBaker
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    Day 2 launched with Jeff Miller from Burke (and conference co-chair) giving us a nice summary of the previous day. Then we moved into two presentations looking at differences in sample composition from traditional online panels versus those constructed through online intercepts. This is a really important issue given the current trend among panel companies…

  • CASRO Online Conference: Day 1

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    RegBaker
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    I’m at the CASRO Online Conference: Issues in Panel Management and Online Data Collection. The Twitter hashtag is #casro if you like to follow the blow-by-blow. The conference opened with a keynote by Jacqueline Anderson from Forrester. She said all of the things you would want a keynoter to say to open a conference like…

  • Mobile content is twice as difficult

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    RegBaker
    in ,

    The above is the title of a new post this week by Jakob Nielsen. Here is the link: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mobile-content-comprehension.html. The study he refers to is one that applied the Cloze test to the privacy policies of a number of websites. The key finding: comprehension for iPhone readers is 48% of what is on a PC.…