Category: Web Surveys
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Online samples: Paying attention to the important stuff
Those of you who routinely prowl the MRX blogosphere may have noticed a recent uptick in worries about speeders, fraudulent respondents, and other undesirables in online surveys. None of this is new. These concerns first surfaced over a decade ago, and I admit to being among those working the worry beads. An awful lot has…
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AAPOR gets it wrong
Unless you’ve been on vacation the last couple of weeks chances are that you have heard that The New York Times CBS News have begun using the YouGov online panel in the models they use to forecast US election results, part of a change in their longstanding policy of using only data from probability-based samples…
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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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Pleeezz!
Today’s update from Research-live.com has this headline: Online trackers not optimised for mobile could 'compromise data quality.' It goes on to explain: GMI, which manages more than 1,000 tracking studies, claims that online trackers that haven’t been optimised for mobile platforms may exclude this growing audience, which could lead to a drop in data quality,…
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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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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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AAPOR gets serious about online sampling
I am at the AAPOR annual conference in Boston. My first observation: it is huge. For example, at 8:00 this morning there are no fewer than eight separate sessions, each with five to six presenters. There is no way you can come close to covering the whole thing. So I have tentatively chosen to focus…
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Faster is better
It’s the college basketball season and that means yours truly is spending way too much time in front of his TV. One of the more annoying commercials that gets repeated over and over is this one by AT&T, driving home the message that faster is better. At least on your iPhone. It’s a sort of…
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Measuring the right stuff
A few weeks back I saw a post by online usability specialist Jakob Nielsen titled, “User Satisfaction vs. Performance Metrics.” His finding is pretty simple: Users generally prefer designs that are fast and easy to use, but satisfaction isn't 100% correlated with objective usability metrics. Nielsen looked at results from about 300 usability tests in…
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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…