Panels 2006

I’ve just come back from Barcelona where I took part in the ESOMAR  Panels 2006 Conference.  Like its predecessor in Budapest in 2005, the conference was a worldwide gathering of researchers to talk about current issues facing panel developers and users.  And like its predecessor, it was first rate.  In future posts I will discuss some of the specific papers and research presented but for now I simply want to summarize the basic themes:

• The overarching theme was the rapid growth and maturation of the panel industry.  Not long ago this was mostly a US phenomenon but there now are large numbers of panels throughout the world, not just in Europe but in Latin America and Asia as well. 
• Hand-in-hand with this growth have come concerns if not downright worry about data quality issues.  The panel industry as a whole seems to understand that they have some problems to deal with and they include professional respondents, unacceptable levels of satisficing, multi-panel membership, and sometimes even downright fraud.  And so there is research going on to try to gauge how serious these problems are in individual panels and how best to prevent or deal with them.
• There were papers on mode effects, incentives, and the importance of the respondent survey taking experience.  The most interesting research in all of these areas is being done in Europe.
• There was some discussion of new areas for development.  These included B2B panels where the sense was that they have lagged dramatically behind consumer panels and what we might look to for with Web 2.0.
• As in Budapest there was a lengthy interactive discussion about standards. At the moment these are mostly self-imposed, self-policing standards by the panel industry.  Nonetheless, they provide useful guidelines for panel users faced with the need to evaluate and select panel vendors.

While there were lots of good papers and interesting stuff there also were a couple of disappointments.  First among them was the shortage of papers by US panel companies.  Harris Interactive was there and gave a kind of everything’s-gonna-be-all-right paper on professional respondents, but that was about it.  There also was not a whole lot of panel user viewpoint expressed.  That said, this conference and the previous one in Budapest were the among the best conferences I’ve attended over the last five years.  Good stuff.  More later.