The Survey Geek

Category: Web Surveys

  • Engaged or still bored?

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    RegBaker
    in

    I have just returned from THE Market Research Event. Yes, that’s how they promote it. I was only there a single day due to some heavy scheduling conflicts but in my limited time I heard a lot about “respondent engagement.” Everybody is indeed talking about it. Socratic Technologies has been doing a lot of this…

  • Ready, set, go!

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    RegBaker
    in

    I am in midst of preparing a presentation for THE Market Research Event next week.  The title of my presentation aside, the context is the recent focus on designing more attractive and entertaining surveys as a way to get respondents to engage with them thoughtfully rather than just zipping through them without a whole lot…

  • Have we lost touch with reality?

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    RegBaker
    in

    No, this is not a comment on John McCain's surprising performance in the presidential polls.  Rather, it's the title of a recent one-day conference put on by the Association for Survey Computing in London. While  I admire these guys for their creative approach to meetings in places like The Old Doctor Butler's Head they also…

  • Next/Previous or Previous/Next

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    RegBaker
    in

    As regular readers (if there are any) know, I am a big fan of Jakob Nielsen, the Web usability guru.  In this week's alert he takes up the fascinating topic of the order of buttons in a dialog box, specifically, should we display OK and then Cancel or Cancel and then OK.  His conclusion: "In…

  • The Trade-off on Trade-offs

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    RegBaker
    in , ,

    It’s just dawned on me that while I posted a number of updates from GOR08 I have not reported on the interesting research that Bob Rayner, Mick Couper, Dan Hartman, and I presented.  The issue at hand was the "best" way to ask feature trade-off questions online.  For some time we have been presenting pairs…

  • How Much Does It Hurt?

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    RegBaker
    in

    Talk of visual analog scales (VAS) was everywhere at GOR08.  These are scales that measure a characteristic or attitude across a continuum without the use of labels, numbers, or other markers, except for endpoints.  Their classic use has been in pain measurement as in the example below:   In online research they typically are presented…

  • Trying Hard to Engage

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    RegBaker
    in

    I find it strangely heartening that researchers are finally beginning to tune into the reality that many of the newly-recognized problems of online research are rooted in bad questionnaires.  High termination rates, high levels of satisficing, and falling response rates are at least partially blamed on questionnaires that are too long, too complex, too poorly…

  • Some Days are Better than Others

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    RegBaker
    in

    One of the downsides of being a compulsive conference goer is that you tend to hear essentially the same paper, although by different people from different companies, on more than one occasion.  One of the ways in which the MR research on research world differs from that of academic methodological research is the complete isolation…

  • Online vs. Phone

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    RegBaker
    in

    I’m here in Hamburg at the 10th General Online Research Konferenz or simply GOR08.  The morning featured a keynote from Randy Thomas, a veritable Web research machine from Harris Interactive. His talk was mostly around research he has reported on previously, but he did make four interesting observations about online as compared to telephone that…

  • Blind Studies on the Web

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    RegBaker
    in

    The CASRO Code of Standards and Ethics for Survey Research has recently been amended to allow for conducting blind studies on the Web.  This comes up fairly often in situations where a client has a list of their customers  they wish to survey anonymously in the belief that they will get more unbiased information if…