Category: Sampling
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Failure to replicate
The not-so-big new last week was the NYT article with the intriguing title, “Many Psychology Findings Not as Strong as Claimed, Study Says,” a rehash of this article in Science. In case you missed it, the bottom line is that findings from roughly two-thirds of studies in peer-reviewed journals could not be replicated. This should…
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Representivity ain’t what it used to be
I am on my way back from ESOMAR APAC in Singapore where I gave a short presentation with the title, “What you need to know about online panels.” Part of the presentation was about the evolution of a set of widely-accepted QA practices that while standard in the US and much of Europe are sometimes…
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Online Sampling Again
Last week two posts on the GreenBook Blog, one by Scott Weinberg and a response by Ron Sellers, bemoaned the quality of online research and especially its sampling. And who can blame them? All of us, including me, have been known to go a little Howard Beale on this issue from time to time. We…
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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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Why does it work?
Now there is a question that we ought to ask more often. At last week's MRMW Conference we heard about a whole lot of different methods—some mobile and some online—for which their evangelists made great claims. And those claims generally focused on the great insights they can deliver about some generic ill-defined group, typically "people"…
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There you go again!
One hears lots of silly things said at MR conferences and one of the silliest and oft-repeated refrains is that you can't do surveys with probability samples any more. There are even those who say that you never could. As often as I get the chance I point out that that's total nonsense. Lots of…
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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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Vendors say the darndest things
Today I got a promo piece from a global online panel vendor. On the front page they describe their offering as "high quality representative and validated panels in Brazil, Russia, India, China and now Mexico." According to Internet World Stats the Internet penetration in these countries is 38%, 43%, 7%, 32%, and 27% respectively. I…