How to react when your research results are ignored
By Edward Appleton
I wonder how many of us have experienced this: You execute a great market research project, present the results, use multiple data sources, come to a recommendation and state indicated actions only to have your advice completely ignored.
I'd guess it must have happened to every single one of us over the course of our careers. Having our recommendations overruled or ignored is extremely frustrating and one of the most important issues for client-side researchers. So what's the best way to behave when your advice is ignored?
Read on...
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Forget exact science: Drawing conclusions from observational research
By Kevin Gray
Say, for example, we observe that some beer brands are much more popular in certain parts of the country than in others. Or perhaps we find that some fashion brands are strongly preferred by younger women and other brands by older women.
By contrast, let's consider an agricultural experiment in which two kinds of fertilizer are applied to two varieties of soybeans under three degrees of soil compaction and three amounts of watering. The plants are raised under controlled greenhouse conditions and the main purpose of the research is to learn whether one fertilizer will produce higher yields than the other.
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How to make mobile research work - for everyone
By Kristin Luck
The July issue of Quirk's features a focus on mobile research. In this article from our archives, Kristin Luck offers some best practices for mobile research to help practitioners keep the respondents in mind and avoid letting technology distract us from meeting their needs.As a planet, we've become people on the move - with millions connecting on-the-fly through mobile devices ranging from smartphones to tablets. In fact, 2011 is widely being hailed as "The Year of the Tablet" and Forrester Research predicts that this year, tablet sales in the U.S. will double and that by 2015, nearly a quarter of all personal computing devices will be a tablet. This rapidly changing section of the consumer market has impacted market researchers as mobile research technologies and methods must be developed at nearly the same speed as new mobile devices. This presents several challenges to us as market researchers. Read on...
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An 'enhance'ment to tackle today's tele-sampling challenges?
By Lyle Durbin
For quite some time, public opinion researchers have relied heavily on the telephone to reach random, unbiased samples that were projectable to any given population. Initially, this was easily achieved with virtually all households containing a telephone line via a landline that was answered frequently. But with Caller ID and the pervasiveness of cell phones, the landline is no longer the gold standard in gen-pop sampling.
Read on...
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Research War Stories: 'Don't you tell them anything about my business!'
Usually, it's clients who complain about the recruiting for groups, insisting that someone doesn't belong in the group. However, Laird Brown recalls being in the viewing room observing a focus group of small business owners. The door to the observation room suddenly burst open and a large and unpleasant-looking man strode forward and started pounding on the one-way glass. Read on...
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