It was a long, arduous process (and still is), but it was worth it: Versta Research has been awarded certification for compliance to ISO 27001! This is one of the most widely recognized and internationally accepted information security standards. Certification puts Versta Research among a small handful of market research and insights firms that undergo rigorous and regular external audits of its IT systems, which includes the management of its people, processes, and technology. It reflects a commitment to industry-leading information security measures, ensuring the utmost protection for our (a ..read more

Last week we highlighted new research showing that removing poor-quality respondents from data can actually make things worse. The reason? Poor-quality respondents may represent a unique segment with respect to what you are measuring, such that removing them skews your sample. But that doesn’t mean you should keep junky data. Instead, it means you should carefully identify inattentive cases, consider your sampling, and take a light touch in removing problematic non-fraudulent respondents. The best way to identify inattentive cases is to build into your survey various types of survey attention ..read more

It might seem obvious that if your survey respondents are inattentive and not reading your survey questions, then you ought to delete them from your data. “Get rid of them!” we often say. “Give me replacements who I can count on to focus on the questions and offer thoughtful answers!” The problem, however, is that deleting inattentive respondents can introduce biases and undermine the validity of research findings. Why? Because often they represent a unique category of people who, if you cut them, make your sample less representative. A 2022 research article in Public Opinion Quarterly written ..read more

It’s the word “material” as in these examples: “The goal of this research was to identify and understand material differences in consumer preferences and behaviors.” “Men chose the blue design by 3 percentage points more than women did, but this does not constitute a material difference.” “The gap between the two groups is not material.” At first I was put off by the word as being yet another example of consultants trying to impress with fancy sounding language. But I came to appreciate it. Why? Because the word helps in our ongoing struggle to teach clients that statistical significance does ..read more

Versta Research has received a lot of inquiries and projects over the last few years around building personas. It represents an interesting shift among our clients from a previous focus on segmentation. And it brings us back to Versta’s roots in social science, from whence the very name “Versta” is derived. Personas are today’s business-equivalent of Max Weber’s ideal types. Weber, a sociologist and political economist, formalized the concept over a century ago: “An ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, di ..read more

This is my first foray into testing the powers of AI and wondering how we might use it in market research. I was inspired by a LinkedIn post from an actuary who was deeply impressed by a poem that ChatGPT wrote about actuaries. I was impressed, too. So I asked it to write a poem about market researchers. Not that we use poems in market research – but this is a fun experiment for me to get started. Here it is: In the realm where insights thrive and data gleams, Reside the silent heroes behind the scenes. With keen eyes and curious minds, they embark, Into the world of markets, cold and dark. Ma ..read more

When translating consumer or business surveys into other languages, there are several approaches you might take. All have varying degrees of cost and complexity. For example, you can have a machine do it (uh–don’t do that) or a person. You can have one person translate or multiple. Two specific approaches recently tested by a team of researchers in Germany (reported in the Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology) are back translation and team translation. Back translation involves “translating an already translated document back to the original source language” via two independent transla ..read more

Last week we published the Spring 2023 Versta Research Newsletter which offers our feature article on Five Research Lessons from the Pandemic Years. It documents the dramatic shifts that COVID-19 has wrought within the professional world of market research. It affected not only how we work (from what locations, and via what technologies) but the substance of our work, as well. We highlight five of those shifts, casting them as “lessons learned” even though the implications are still playing themselves out. Here is an overview of the five research lessons highlighted in the newsletter: 1. The F ..read more

A cool thing about the National Health Interview Survey (a gold standard survey conducted by the National Institutes of Health) is that it continuously tracks telephone access within the U.S. population. In particular, it tracks what type of access people have, which is essential for pollsters and researchers who need to find survey samples that represent the population. Here is the latest data from 2021, showing that the vast majority of Americans no longer have landlines. They are entirely dependent on mobile phones: What does this mean for research? If you want to conduct a phone survey ..read more

The problem (so we’ve been told) with check-all-that-apply survey questions is that respondents do not process the full list of response options carefully and thoughtfully. Instead, they glance through, knowing they’re supposed to find at least a few that are relevant to them. They check the ones that jump out (often at the top of the list, or at the bottom), feel satisfied that they’ve done their job, and then move on to the next question. Well, that is what we have always believed! A new article in the Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology calls into question this traditional wisdom i ..read more