1 topic 5 blogs: New Media Survey Questions

1 topic 5 blogs: On the 15th (or very near to it!) of every month 5 market researchers post a short opinion piece on a predefined topic that is relevant to the market research sphere. The researchers: Annie Pettit¹, Bernie Malinoff², Josh Mendelsohn³, Joel Rubinson⁴ and myself. Links to their posts on the topic follow this article.

The face of research has changed and so must our methodology. We are no longer living in an age where we need to ask questions face to face or fill out paper based surveys. Online surveys have provided us with a fast and somewhat interactive medium to gather opinions. With the advent of new media, survey companies are beginning to jump on the band wagon with all manner of ways for respondents to answer questions through fancy flash applications and virtual environments designed to extract an understanding of respondents preference. With new technology comes the ability to ask questions in a manner that changes not only the dynamic but also the level of engagement that respondents can have with surveys. The danger, is the lack of understanding of how these new media questions change responses in comparison to conventional question types.

My immediate thought is: who cares. I place more value on data received from a respondent that is engaged than I do a respondent who feels like a drone clicking his or her mouse. There is a lot of research out there that speaks to the idea that engagement in a topic leads to higher participation rates and higher quality data. Does it not follow the same logic that even with less engaging topics engaging survey design could lead to increases in participation and data quality? I believe that too many companies hold on to survey questions that don’t get the answers that they’re actually looking for. This is especially true for tracking studies. Granted the idea of a tracking study suggests that all remains equal with the exception of time, however, things change and so should surveys. You can’t continue to ask the question the wrong way just because you’ve always done it that way.

Let’s think about it from the respondents perspective. Would you prefer clicking in a matrix to provide your scaled opinion of a brand or would you prefer to be able to see a picture of a shelf and reach out to grab your product or service of choice? I would choose the later. I believe that future questions about brands and packaging will find a home in the realm of implicit association tests (at least for CPG research). Take the product shelf for example. I would prefer to know how long it took n=1000 to choose different products then I would their rating of the product.