Radiance Blog

Let’s say that you just conducted a public survey of your community for a community needs assessment.  In your community, 29% of residents are between age 18 and 34, and 29% are age 55 or older.  Yet among your survey respondents, 8% are  aged 18-34, while 52% are aged 55 or older (this is a [...]

In a previous post we discussed how survey length can indirectly drive up participation recruitment costs.  Another often-ignored consequence of long surveys is poor quality data that may or may not be easy to identify.  Even conscientious participants lose the desire to be cooperative as a survey drags on.  By the sixth page, or the [...]

In a recent edition of Quirk’s Marketing Research Review, there was an article (Article ID: 20081004….requires registration, but it is free) on the Net Promoter Score (NPS).  The NPS has long been touted by many as the best way to measure customer satisfaction, and a key characteristic of the system is its simplicity. In case you [...]

One of the basic tenets of effective marketing is knowing your target market.  That principle is no less important, and may be even more so, when designing effective market research.  Whether your goal is to encourage people to use your product or service or to encourage them to participate in your study, knowing what motivates [...]

I heard the following conversation a few nights ago while on the bus ride home between the bus driver and a passenger regarding a survey that RTD was administering to a few riders on each bus. “That survey was like a book.” “It even had chapters.” “I think they get paid by the question.” Of [...]

In a recent post, I talked about the problem of professional respondents, and specifically people who cheat to earn their incentive.  At the end of the post, I posed the question, “what can we do?” Here I provide some basics on how to ensure the quality of your online data. Survey Design Screeners. Screeners shouldn’t [...]

We get a lot of inquiries about how to join our panel or participate in our focus groups, and consequently we spend a lot of time explaining that we don’t maintain this kind of recruiting list for participants.  (We custom recruit for almost all our groups.  We’ll explain why below.)  Some questions come from people [...]

This is the third in a series of posts on our recent trip to Africa.  To see our first two posts, click here and here. We checked into a hotel in Antananarivo, and I was delighted to see that the Malagasy people embrace market research.  Inside our room was a customer service survey asking about [...]

Part one of our examination of who uses the Internet looked at the question geographically.  In part two, we’ll look at Internet usage nationwide (data again via the NTIA) broken down by several important demographic variables. In all of the graphs that follow, in-home Internet usage (green portion of the bars) and outside of the [...]

Who can’t answer your Internet survey? Who is unable to view your spiffy new website? Who won’t be reached by your email newsletter? In survey research, we call the answer to these questions coverage error or the proportion of individuals in your population of interest who are unable to be sampled/reached. Although it’s a statistical concept, [...]