More signs of the Apolcalypse

Way back in the last century when Web interviewing was just starting to warm up more than one researcher worried that with the Web as a research medium anybody could create and field a survey. You didn't need a mail room, a call center, or a field force anymore. In 1999, those fears were made flesh with the launch of SurveyMonkey. Even the name seemed to mock us! Since then our fears about DIY eating our lunch have ebbed and flowed, but with the Great Recession they are once again in season as we worry about clients doing more and more "in sourcing" to save money.

My counter to the DIY argument has always been that real researchers add value in all sorts of important ways. Sampling, questionnaire design, and analysis come to mind as skills only acquired through training and experience. But I must confess that I'm not so sure any more. In any given week the trade pubs will deliver to your inbox article after article with research results that frankly are just crap. Bold pronouncements about major trends or new methods that tell you so little about how the research was done that you can't possibly judge its quality or the validity of its conclusions. Yet a careful reading between the lines of most will more often than not hint loudly that the claims being made are nowhere near valid given how the "research" was designed and executed. This stuff is not coming from some guy doing surveys from his basement; this is from companies that claim to be research companies being paid to do research by real clients. Maybe this is just honest incompetence and maybe all of the "real researchers" I've been banking on have found new careers that pay better, but it is more than a little disheartening.

It was in the midst of this near Howard Beale moment that I read Robert Bain's recounting of his month as a panel respondent.

No wonder clients think they can do just as good a job as we can.