The political polling community has taken its share of hits over the last few years and there has been no shortage of brickbats thrown at pollsters both in the US and UK. All sorts of explanations have been suggested. The response within MR has been especially amusing, focusing primarily on measurement error (asking the wrong […]
Each year, MRII and the University Georgia exhibit at conferences around the world. We always enjoy meeting up with old friends and making new ones. So please stop by. Here’s where you can find us in the first half of 2017.
The first time I heard the phrase “good enough” used in an MR context was probably 15 years or so ago at an SPSS event in Montreal. Tony Cowling, then Chairman at TNS, used it to describe how online panels might be used to look for signals from the marketplace that something was afoot and […]
ANN ARBOR, MI, January 10, 2017 — The Board of the Market Research Institute International (MRII) has elected Jon Last, Founder and President of Sports and Leisure Research Group, as Board President for 2017. He succeeds Lisa Courtade, Merck’s Executive Director, Global Customer and Brand Insights, who now becomes Immediate Past President. The Board also […]
This is the last in a series of posts arguing that the fundamental problem with the recent US electoral polls was the failure to achieve representative samples of the population that actually showed up to vote. I hope I have been clear that achieving such a sample with current methods is no mean feat given […]
In two previous posts I commented on the difficulties that pollsters face getting representative samples regardless of the methodology they choose. Those difficulties vary depending on the broad approach to sampling (probability vs. nonprobability), but in all cases it takes a deep knowledge of the target population, a science-based approach, and a little luck to […]
In yesterday’s post I offered a quick overview of the potential pitfalls of telephone polls that rely on probability samples. The major worry is bias created by extraordinarily high nonresponse. When 90% or more of your sample chooses not to do your survey you should assume bias and have some plan to correct it. Most rely […]
The folks over at Pew have put up a blog post of sorts that that starts what will no doubt be a long, torturous, and, if recent history is any guide, ultimately forgettable series of investigations aimed at trying to determine why, once again, the polls were wrong. The Pew post lays out three potential […]
This post is courtesy of MRII Board member Charlotte Sibley. I was the first MBA Pfizer hired into market research in 1970. The research we did then was pretty basic: focus groups, conventional questionnaires, and analyzing IMS data. I was on product teams, but R&D, sales – and to a lesser degree, marketing –really […]
A week or so ago my email included news of a new study breathlessly announcing, “96 percent of Americans are shopping online.” That number struck me as high since the very idea that 96% of Americans even use the Internet sounded like a stretch. So I asked Google, “How many Americans use the Internet?” First […]