Tag: The New MR
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Today is Privacy Day!
Almost 20 years ago some colleagues and I edited a book with the inviting title, Computer Assisted Information Collection. Experts on a wide variety of computer-assisted methods contributed the chapters and I was tasked with writing the last chapter, a look into the future of technology and survey research. At the risk of tooting my own…
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Aligning practice and principle in the NewMR
Regular readers of this blog (assuming they exist) may have noticed that since retiring almost three years ago posts here are few and far between. That does not mean lack of interest. Much to my surprise I have discovered that my fascination with market, opinion, and social research remains strong, even when I no longer…
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Game-changers and same-changers
I am a political junkie. I wish I could write “recovering political junkie” but I know I’m not there yet. One current challenge is to not buy Double Down: Game Change 2012, the new book on the 2012 US presidential election by the same guys who gave us Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain…
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Is research on research the real deal?
David Carr had a piece in last Sunday's New York Times about the difficulty of distinguishing journalism from activism. His first sentence sums up the issue pretty succinctly, "In a refracted media world where information comes from everywhere, the line between two 'isms' — journalism and activism — is becoming difficult to discern." His case…
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Sir Martin on crowdsourcing of ads
The March issue of The Harvard Business Review has in interview with Martin Sorrell. At one point the interviewer asks whether crowdsourced ads and algorithms are the future model of advertising. Sir Martin’s response is interesting: You are tapping into the knowledge and the information of people all over the world. That’s fantastic. And the…
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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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Repealing Reg’s law
While I recognize that it’s not very fashionable to complain about being quoted out of context in this era of “You didn’t build that” I’m going to take a run at it nonetheless. Back on July 12 in a post about the MRMW Conference I noted that we are moving into an era when data…
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Does evidence still matter?
Laast week there was an interview of sorts with Gayle Fuguitt on Research-Live. At one point she says: "We did some work asking our management what they were looking for from us and one of the points they raised was the issue of speed versus precision. The point wasn’t that they didn’t want precision; the…
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Why does it work?
Now there is a question that we ought to ask more often. At last week's MRMW Conference we heard about a whole lot of different methods—some mobile and some online—for which their evangelists made great claims. And those claims generally focused on the great insights they can deliver about some generic ill-defined group, typically "people"…