Category: Web Panels
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The end of “don’t ask, don’t tell” in online survey research?
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…
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The bottom line on online sample routers
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.…
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The problem of router bias
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…
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Respondents in routers
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…
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Let’s have a look at online sample routers
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…
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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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Getting to the bottom of the respondent engagement problem
I've been working along with some colleagues on the lit review section of a paper for the ESOMAR Congress. The topic is "gamification" as the next experiment designed to increase respondent engagement in online surveys. As anyone who has done their homework knows the issue of survey respondent engagement did not arise with the growth…
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New challenges to online panel data quality
Among the many criticisms we hear of online panels is the charge that we have no idea whether these respondents are who they say they are and that the incentive-driven nature of panels encourages people to pretend they are someone they are not. A number of companies have introduced products to clean up online samples…
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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…
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Let’s focus on the third leg
Kristin Luck writes a column for RBR and for two issues in a row she's worked the worry beads about what she sees as declining interest in online panel data quality. In the current column Kristin draws heavily on a reaction to her first column by Jackie Lorch. Jackie summarizes two legs of the online…