Over the next few months I will go through a couple of case studies on the process we use to design a survey. As you know I am a firm believer that the key to effective surveys lies in the design. No amount of analysis can make up for asking the wrong questions or asking [...]

In the fall I gave a teleconference on the Key to Effective Surveys. I thought I would share the questions that people asked at the end of the teleconference. These may be some of the same questions you have when thinking about designing your own survey. – Ed
The Key to Effective Surveys: Proper [...]

It’s statistically significant! Wow! But is it significant?
Or even better, is it meaningful?
I’ve been doing survey design and market research for 25 years and I’m still amazed when I’m asked: “How many responses do I need to make my study ‘statistically significant’?” Hearing those words “statistically significant” in a market research context always confuses [...]

I was asked the following question recently, “From a statistical standpoint, how do you see three ‘No’s’ votes out of a possible 23 board members. Can you find out specifically what the error would be?”
This brings up a common misconception when thinking about statistics and interpreting your data.
THE SITUATION ABOVE HAS NOTHING TO [...]

The power of SurveyGizmo can make reaching out to your customers more accessible and even make the survey process easier for your customer. So what could possibly be wrong with sending a customer satisfaction survey? . . . Plenty!
We’ve all participated in customer satisfaction surveys. Some may have been okay, most probably not. It [...]

“Attitude is everything” has significance for more than just football or other sports! Cultivating a sampling attitude can help you “win” improvements to your survey process.
We have already seen the power of sampling in predicting election results in my prior post on election sampling and intuition tells us that sampling should save time and money. [...]

Election season is the time for lots of polls, which makes it a good time to highlight what they can teach us about our surveys! Basically a poll is just a type of survey and so the principles that make polling powerful apply to surveys.
Can the results of polls be trusted? I just read an [...]

It’s been awhile and 2008 has been a busy year. It has also been a year where people have been looking to get more out of their surveys. I have had a steady stream of people coming to me with questions like:

I have all this data, but I’m not sure what it is telling me?
How [...]

Expanded client base plus 3rd party platform integration fuel growth
Boulder, Colorado; Cambridge, Massachusetts SurveyGizmo, an online survey and data collection company, today announced their 2007 results, showing year-over-year customer growth of more than 500%. “We’re really pleased at how quickly SurveyGizmo has been embraced by the online survey market,” said Scott McDaniel, CEO of SurveyGizmo. [...]

I’m back with some accepted best practices that I promised from my article Surveys for Fun or Profit? You may have already seen the Top Ten Survey Best Practices list that Christian Vanek and I delivered at a free SurveyGizmo Webinar at the end of September. If not, I encourage you to check it out. [...]

Surveys can be fun! Newspapers, TV programs, radio shows and the like love to quote survey results because audiences find them entertaining. We enjoy learning other people’s personal habits or political views and seeing where we fit in. (Check out SurveyGizmo’s ipoll application (ipoll.surveygizmo.com) for some fun examples.)
But surveys are also a critical component of [...]

The Pareto principle (which you may know as the 80-20 rule) states that, for many phenomena, 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes. It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., “80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients.”
The Pareto principle also applies to survey research. When planning your [...]

At Survey Design and Analysis I am the resident survey expert and statistician. Okay I admit it, “I am a statistician..” Statistics is a big part of Market Research but I’m not sure that is well understood.
What exactly is a statistician and why is it important in Market Research? Quality Improvement guru, Bill Sherkenbach [...]

Why do people do surveys?
I don’t like the use of extrinsic incentives (bribes) for doing surveys. Wrong motivation, wrong expectations, wrong outcome!
Experiment in the Woods
I recently hired a dozen workers. I divided them at random into two groups of six. I took them out to the woods and took group A to a clearing with [...]

We’re happy to welcome survey expert Ed Halteman to the SurveyGizmo family. Ed took his first course on survey design in 1978 and has designed and analyzed more than 250 surveys in the past 10 years. Ed, who has a master’s degree in applied mathematics and a Ph.D. in statistics, currently heads Survey Design [...]