Market and consumer research surveys have a reputation of being boring. Obviously, that’s not a tradition any of us want to maintain because of the negative impact it has on completion rates, data quality, and costs.

Fortunately, we have solutions!

In this month’s issue of Quirk’s magazine, Annie Pettit, our Chief Research Officer, shares our perspective on how anyone can create more playful questionnaires that people will actually want to answer. You can read our article on the Quirk’s website here or check out the entire Jan/Feb 2023 issue on BlueToad here.

And if you’re really passionate about creating a better research experience, join Annie for an Esomar workshop where you’ll get hands on instruction and practice creating kinder, more respectful, and more playful questionnaires. Whether you’re a junior or senior agency or corporate researcher working in healthcare or mobile gaming, you’ll leave the workshop with practical knowledge you can start implementing immediately! Learn more about the Esomar workshop and register here.

Enjoy!

Researchers want people to feel comfortable when they’re answering questions so they will share complete and honest answers about their public and private lives. This can be difficult because you first need to create a research environment that shows them they are trusted and respected.

If this resonates for you, then please join our Chief Research Officer, Annie Pettit, for a 3-day (2 hours per day) questionnaire design workshop hosted by Esomar on February 21, 22, 23, at 13:00 UTC.

In this highly interactive masterclass, you will learn about the psychology of answering questions and how to apply that knowledge in a practical way to questionnaire design. You will learn to create questions that make people feel valued and respected, that accommodate normal human behaviours no matter how strange those behaviours may seem to you, and that make people look forward to participating in the next research project.

Registration is now open on the Esomar website!

What will you learn?

After completing this training, you should be able to:

• Understand how human psychology interacts with the questionnaire experience and how to write questions that accommodate normal behaviours
• Write questions that are kind and respectful towards people who are marginalised, and people who are embarrassed to share personal aspects of their lives
• Write questionnaires that people want to answer this time and the next
• Write questions that are fun and playful

By the end of the workshop, you will have built a set of resources that can be leveraged in a range of future questionnaires.

Programme at a glance

Session 1: Understanding human nature

• How does human psychology impact how people interpret and respond to questionnaires
• What are some basic rules for creating respectful questionnaires
• What mindset do we need to take when building questionnaires

Session 2: Making tough topics more comfortable

• Creating compassionate screener questions
• Writing respectful data quality questions
• Asking about embarrassing or private issues
• Eliciting truth when it comes to unethical and illegal behaviours

Session 3: Creating a playful experience for everyone

• How to write playful questions that excite and make people think
• Incorporating play into serious topics

Please click here to register on the Esomar website.

About Annie Pettit

Annie Pettit is Chief Research Officer, North America, at E2E Research, an ISO 27001 certified, ESOMAR corporate member company that offers market research, data analytics, and business intelligence solutions to help research leaders understand their buyers, brands, and businesses. Annie is a research methodologist who specializes in research design and analysis, data quality, and innovative methods. She holds a PhD in experimental psychology from York University in Canada, is a Certified Analytics and Insights Professional (CAIP), and is a Fellow of the Canadian Research Insights Council (CRIC). Annie is also Chair of the Canadian ISO Standards Committee (ISO 20252), and the author of “People Aren’t Robots: A practical guide to the psychology and technique of questionnaire design.”

EVENT PASSED

Room 2 | 9:40 am – 10:10 am | Wednesday, October 12, 2022

Researchers have gotten very accustomed to writing questionnaires as if they were Charlies Dickens or Jane Austen. But who writes like that? Who talks like that? And how is alienating people through incomprehensible grammar and paragraph long sentences going to increase engagement, data quality, and completion rates?

In this presentation, Annie will show you five tactics for writing questionnaires that are playful and appeal to real people living today. Even better, these tactics are free and can be implemented on the questionnaire you’re writing right now. Let’s make research more playful!

Key takeaways:

• Questionnaires can be professional, generate accurate data, and be enjoyable for participants, all at the same time.
• Creating playful questionnaires doesn’t have to cost any money or take any extra time. It just needs commitment to creating a better experience for participants.
• Every researcher has the skills to create questionnaires that are more playful and engaging for research participants.

See you then!

This webinar from the New England chapter of the Insights Association included four speakers:

• Melissa Geathers from InnovateMR as the moderator,
• Mujde Yuksel from Suffolk University,
• Owen Jenkins from Protobrand, and
• Kathryn Ambroze from HCD Research.

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Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2

The webinar started with Mujde Yuksel sharing a good overview of Daniel Kahneman’s theory of decision marking. Kahneman is Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Emeritus at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton University, and a fellow of the Center for Rationality at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He hasn’t been active on Twitter for a year but you can find his Twitter account here.

Kahneman’s behavioral research describes human behavior as having two systems.

• System 1: The vast majority of human behavior falls under system 1. It is fast, effortless, and hard to control. It plays with our subconscious mind and underlying emotions and feelings.
• System 2: On the other hand, system 2 is slow, explicit, and logical. It deals in our deliberate, conscious thinking and is more rational and pragmatic.

When conducting behavioral science research, we need to ensure we incorporate techniques and methodologies that let us uncover both system 1 and system 2 thinking.

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Consumer Decision Making

Owen Jenkins then discussed three drivers of consumer decision making. Specifically, he focused on:

• Functional characteristics: Whether B2B or B2C, consumers consider the features of products and services that help them perform activities. What does the product or service do for you, what does it help you do better, faster, or cheaper. Most traditional research does a great job at measuring these aspects of the consumer journey.
• Symbolic properties: Consumers also consider symbolic features of products and services. For example, there are common cultural or societal understandings around certain brands or products that tell us about the people who use them. For instance, we can interpret that someone who buys Patagonia products cares about the environment, someone who buys a Harley has a rebellious spirit, and someone who buys an Alfa Romeo has style and sophistication.
• Emotional activations: Lastly, we feel personal thoughts and emotions about brands. You might feel good about buying Toms shoes because you know it means they donated a pair of shoes to someone in need. Or, you might feel excited about buying a Prada bag because you’ve always dreamed of having a small piece of luxury for yourself.

Even if you haven’t got access to or the budget for advanced technology like facial coding, eye tracking, heart rate tracking, skin conduction testing, EEG, or fMRIs , traditional online research is still very much an option.

Implicit tests can incorporate things like:

• Imagery: Rather than asking people to describe what they like or dislike about something, they can be asked to select images that reflect their thoughts, feelings, or emotions. Once they’ve selected those images via system 1, they can then try to describe why they selected those images using system 2.
• Metaphors: Depending on the culture or country you were raised in, the complex ideas represented by metaphors can mean many different things. But, it’s still possible to ask people to select metaphors and/or similes that reflect a brand. The system 2 mind can then take the time to explain and describe why that metaphor is most reflective of the brand or product.

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A Continuum of Decision Making

Lastly, using a case study, Kathryn talked about how people see, interpret, and behave in the world not as a binary system of conscious vs non-conscious actions and emotions, but rather as a continuum.

For example, when you are shopping at the store, you automatically reach for the brand you always buy – you don’t think about it. But what happens when the brand isn’t there? Then you become conscious of the absence. You have to turn on your system 2 thinking to figure what’s happened – is the brand in a different place, do you have to identify what the alternative options are, do you have to make a brand new decision based on product features rather than on brand recognition.

Thank you for a great webinar!

Learn more from our case studies

• Improving Sales by Understanding Pain Points of Sales Reps – A home appliance survey case study
• Increasing Customer Acceptance For Controversial Pet Food Format – A survey case study
• Increasing Enrollment Through A More Meaningful Brand Purpose – An education survey case study

Learn more from our other blog posts

• How to Leverage TikTok as a Consumer and Customer Insights Tool
• 8 Engaging Question Types to Improve Participants’ Survey Taking Experience
• Trackers Suck. Here’s how to fix them.

The secret to successful research may not be a secret but in the hustle and bustle of work, we often forget one or more of them. If that describes your day today, then consider this your quick and friendly reminder!

#1 Don’t sell: solve problems.

As researchers, our job isn’t to sell questionnaire design, scripting, data analysis, report writing, and dashboards. Those may in fact be the specific services we offer but our real job is help our partners discover practical solutions to their business problems – Why isn’t this SKU selling, what new product do consumers want, who are my customers, how can I upsell to a target audience, how can I complete more projects when half my team is on holidays, how can I help a client when I don’t have all the services they need?

Our job is to thoroughly understand the business and research problems, and then translate them into appropriate solutions. Whether it’s concept studies, customer segmentation, journey mapping, market forecasting, or providing professional services, if we can’t translate a need into a custom solution, we’ve not done our job.

#2 Know your audience

A lot of market research starts by truly understanding a specific audience. Who are they – what are their hobbies, where do they live, where do they work, what does their family look like? It’s really easy to calculate a median age and the percentage of customers who are female but the last few years have taught us a lot about intersectionality – it’s not just “women,” it’s “disabled Black women.” In the research world, we understand this as customer segments or personas.

After conducting a well-designed survey, focus group, personal interviews, social listening, or analytics, you’ll have the necessary data to run a reliable segmentation and identify 3 to 5 distinct target groups of people within your ideal audience. For example, a couple of common ones are Primary Grocery Shoppers and Moms of Infants.

Once the data has spoken, you can then build a unique buyer persona, a fictional character, for each target group to clearly outline each one’s unique characteristics. This will make developing a set of products, prices, messaging, and marketing that genuinely resonates with each one much easier.

#3 Map your marketing

Researchers spend a lot of time mapping journeys – shopper journeys, patient journeys, student journeys, employee journeys. Building products that people want to use and buy means understanding the wants, needs, and challenges customers experience at every stage of the journey. You might discover that the most problematic stage, in fact, is not the most problematic stage.

Build a plan to understand every stage of the journey from end to end. As eloquently shared by Biz Davis from Abacus Agency, you need to understand whether your brand is lacking in awareness, interest, consideration, purchase, or advocacy, and whether consumers want to be entertained, inspired, educated, convinced, or delighted.

#4 Think like you search

If you’ve written a questionnaire before, you know how important this tip is. Sure, you could write a questionnaire as if you were Charles Dickens showing off his stunning, grammatically correct 200-word sentences with multiple, embedded clauses.

Or.

You could search on TikTok and Twitter and find out how people really talk. Use phrases regular people use. Use words everyone understands even if there’s a technically more precise word. Write questions and answers the same way people search and you’ll end up with a questionnaire that people want to answer!

#5 Promote your content

In the marketing world, this means thinking about native ads, social sharing, and cross-channel marketing. But for researchers, it means sharing your research across the company – from researcher to brand manager to innovation team to development team to marketer.

When everyone in the company is familiar with the results of your research, they can each do their part to amplify the outcome of the insight.

#6 Tell a great story

How do you get colleagues to share your research? Easy! Well, it’s not that easy. Storytelling is a necessary skill that will carry your research results throughout the company. Let people know what is exciting about the insights, how they could be used to reach consumers in unexpected ways, how they could personally benefit from understanding the results.

And sure, though the bulk of the research will be educational, informative, and standard, be sure to incorporate just a small bit of fun along the way.

#7 Become an authority

Don’t rest on the laurels of the research you did last year. That’s old news now. The theory may be correct but times and technology have changed. Follow up last year’s study with one that builds on what you’ve learned from your colleagues, seen among your competitors, and witnessed in related industries.

Show your colleagues what your brand could become if everyone worked together to leverage new, innovative research methods, techniques, and skills. Become the expert at your company who constantly pushes everyone forward towards building a better product and a better company. Get that seat at the table.

#8 Start small to grow big

You could build and execute a 5-year research plan.

Or, you could start small with a single project that gives you a solid overview of one product or target audience. Inhale it, memorize it, internalize it.

Then build the five-year plan. Because at this point, you’ve seen all the strengths and weaknesses among a specific product, how your colleagues work together, how your company systems work, and what’s happening in your industry. You have perspective now.

Now you get it. Now you can think really big.

My inspiration for this post?

I watched a webinar given by Biz Davis from Abacus Agency in Toronto in which he shared a bunch of his secrets for building an effective marketing strategy. The webinar will be posted on their website very soon so do go have a peek.

While watching, all I could think was how relevant his secrets were, in particular, for market and consumer researchers. The headers are his words, and I riffed on the ideas to bring you the research tips.

Are you ready to plan a great market or consumer research project from End to End? Email your project specifications to our research experts using Projects at E2Eresearch dot com.

Learn more from our other blog posts

• From Digital Fingerprinting to Data Validation: Techniques to Facilitate the Collection of High Quality Market Research Data
• Everything You Need to Know about Conducting Effective Secondary Research
• 8 Engaging Question Types to Improve Participants’ Survey Taking Experience

I’ve argued for years that there’s nothing wrong with DIY research. It’s a pretty easy argument given I’ve been a DIY researcher for many years myself. Of course, I’ve also had extensive training and experience in research design and analysis so it would make sense that Do-It-Yourself research has often been my favourite path.

In reality, the problem isn’t DIY research. The problem is unskilled people not realizing that conducting valid and reliable research requires extensive training and experience. For example, as much as I’d love to DIY a brand new house for you, I have a feeling you wouldn’t be happy with it even if I read every single Dummies manual.

For the sake of this argument then, let’s consider that we’re only talking about DIY research where the person is a qualified researcher with an appropriate designation, e.g., a PRC from the Insights Association or a CAIP in Canada. (BTW, if you’re not already certified, doing so is a GREAT way to tell your clients and colleagues that you are a highly competent researcher who upholds the highest ethical standards.)

Advantages of DIY Research

Agility: Everyone has been in one of these two positions before: You just discovered you need to get a questionnaire into field RIGHT NOW, or you’re watching a questionnaire already in field and you notice that multiple research participants have just provided the same open-end answer. What do you do if it’s Friday at 6pm? You get it done! You don’t have to wait until your supplier gets in on Monday morning so that they can start scripting and be ready for field by Monday evening. When it comes to being agile, no one can get a survey in field or updated faster than a DIY researcher with direct access to their own scripting licence. DIY FTW!

Internal knowledge: Regardless of which side of the fence you usually do your research on, supplier or buyer, you’ve learned the hard way that no one can interpret brand data and tabulations better than someone who has full sight-line into the history, projected future, and context of the brand, its sister brands, and the company – the end-client insights team. The confidential research and proprietary knowledge those researchers leverage while designing and interpreting research cannot be matched by anyone else no matter how much experience they have.

Price!: It’s impossible to beat the price of DIY research. When budgets are tight and the work is essential, this makes the decision simple. But make this choice wisely. Read on to make sure you’re okay forgoing the potential advantages of managed research which could force you to unexpectedly dig into your wallet after the fact.

Advantages of Managed Research

Leverage breadth of experience: Working with a supplier that supports many other types of companies has huge advantages. They’ve seen failures and success in multiple types of projects, companies, and industries. They’ve seen how competitive brands and categories carefully craft questionnaires and discussion guides, interpret unusual data, and solve unexpected, complex business problems. They’re a warehouse of rare knowledge and experience that every client benefits from, even when no one notices. And, they won’t incorporate the unconscious, internal biases that you might have picked up along the way from your standard internal processes.

Engage experts: Most researchers are moderately familiar with a lot of different research techniques. And, most researchers are masters of a few techniques. But being an expert in Conjoint, MaxDiff, TURF analysis, JAR analysis, or segmentation doesn’t mean you’re also an expert at running focus groups, interviews, mystery shops, or IHUTs. When you’re able to identify your own unique set of skills, you can reserve them for the projects you’d be great at and leverage the expertise of other researchers who’d be far more effective at the other projects.

Focus on high value tasks: When you can avoid spending the bulk of your time doing basic tasks like scripting questionnaires and running volumes of tabulations and simple data analyses, you get to spend more of your time on the value-add components of your business – interpreting results, acting on results, and building your business. You get to spend your time creating positive change!

Finish more projects: There are only so many hours in the days. When you’ve got a dedicated team of researchers ready at your beck and call, you can design and complete far more than one concept test, pricing study, or customer experience study every 6 months. Rejoice in the fact that more of your key projects can get done with the attention they deserve, in a timely fashion, and before it’s actually too late and damage has been done.

Get creative: Using research suppliers results in unlimited creativity. Imagine a multi-method, multi-country, multi-language study with brand new techniques applied in brand new ways. Oh my. I’m getting excited thinking about what that amazing study could look like! Ok, maybe you really don’t need to do that. But, with a larger team, you can certainly cast aside any limitations based on  access to tools and build the EXACT project you need. Not just the one fits into your template.

Advantages of a Hybrid DIY Research Model

But really, why must we choose DIY research OR managed research? Why can’t we be DIY researchers sometimes, choose managed research other times, and benefit from the positives of both models?

A skilled researcher who has inherent knowledge of the brand partnering with an experienced research supplier who has in-depth and broad experience with research techniques presents the ultimate research experience. Over time, it can even lead to building a dedicated external team that’s always on call, whether it’s during seasonal highs or end-of-fiscal rush periods, or to get through that huge pile of long overdue work.

In the end, whether you choose DIY research, managed research, or a hybrid model, an informed choice is the best choice!

If you’re ready to work with a research partner who will help you generate great quality data and actionable outcomes, feel free to email your project specifications to our research experts using Projects at E2Eresearch dot com. We’d love to help you build an engaging questionnaire, script the questionnaire, run data analysis, and write a full report.

Learn more from our case studies

• Choosing A Set of Flavors To Minimize Substitutions and Cannibalization | A CPG Cluster Analysis Case Study
• Mapping a Patient Funnel to Mitigate Treatment Barriers
• Optimizing Trade Promotion Spends with a Pricing Simulator
• Tracking Customer Satisfaction Across 8 Countries

Learn more from our other blog posts

• 5 Ways to Protect Your Research Sample Investment
• 8 Engaging Question Types to Improve Participants’ Survey Taking Experience
• Trackers Suck. Here’s how to fix them.

Researchers love trackers. At the same time, we also hate them. Trackers are designed to help us stalk brand metrics and compare them with those of sister brands and competitors over time, and build real-time dashboards that flag tiny issues before they explode into unresolvable problems. But the more the world changes, the more our trackers stay the same. The questions stay the same, the answers stay the same, and the insights… well, they become impossible to find.

Trackers are inherently problematic

One of the biggest complaints researchers have with trackers is that once they’re written, they can’t be changed.

Ever.

When we inevitably discover a question that is poorly written, no longer relevant, or simply wrong, we can’t touch it or we’ll introduce confounds invalidating the trendline for every subsequent question. Data quality is always top of mind for researchers who care about making valid and reliable generalizations.

Oh the times, they are a’changin

But wait. No matter how much we work to keep questions consistent for the sake of research rigor and validity, everything outside of the questions has changed since day one. Every research supplier constantly improves their techniques and processes over time – without getting our approval. Every research participant changes their demographics, internet providers, and digital devices over time – without getting our approval. Like it or not, third parties change the methodological foundation of our trackers every single day without our approval. They’ve embraced change and it makes no sense except for researchers to embrace change too.

Who’s the boss?

Trackers are inanimate objects we personally create to suit our personal needs. Researchers need data that is valid and reliable. We need data that answers our questions and helps solve our challenges. We need to stop letting questionnaires be the boss of us and start making questionnaires work for us. We need to embrace change.

Choose change-resistant designs

Fortunately, researchers have methodological techniques that are designed to be resistant to change. If we build change into every questionnaire, change will have a vastly smaller impact on our data.

How can we do this?

Randomization! When each person receives answers (or questions) in a different order, it helps prevent confounds related to order. Adding an item to a randomized list greatly reduces its ability to affect subsequent items because everyone sees a different set of subsequent items. Make sure to randomize answer options at every appropriate opportunity. If it also makes sense to randomize the order of some questions, then do that too.

Individual presentation. Potential order effects can be reduced even more by combining randomization with individual presentation. Rather than showing a full list of items so that people can scan through the entire list, show items individually. Since everyone sees a different set of initial items, order effects are different for everyone and therefore greatly minimized over the full sample.

Subsets! If you’re accustomed to breaking long questionnaires into shorter, more manageable chunks for participants, you might already be using question subsets. For example, let’s say Q6 has 20 answer options – perhaps 20 brands or 20 product features. With subsets, each research participant gets only 10 answer options – perhaps three are the same for everyone, and the other 7 answers are randomly assigned. By design, no one sees every answer and your friendly, neighbourhood statistician can easily stitch the full questionnaire of 20 answer options back together. Need to add or remove an answer option? Go right ahead. Since half of people wouldn’t have received that item anyways, you aren’t intruding a serious confound. Even better, everyone benefits from a shorter questionnaire!

Know what questions are carved in cement

Some questions should never change. There are only a few seriously important KPIs that get added to the norms/benchmarks database every time you complete a wave. They probably include:

• Purchase intent
• Recommendation
• Satisfaction
• Trust
• Likeability
• Believability

Identify which items on a questionnaire MUST stay the same. They’re the items that are part of every questionnaire ever written for every product line and SKU. From now on, keep them as close as possible to the beginning of the questionnaire . By ensuring this section always stays the same with no potentially new and leading items before them, we can ensure they won’t be confounded by order effects.

And don’t get caught up in the idea that questions tied to financial incentives can’t be changed. Do you really want to incentivize the wrong KPIs and the wrong behaviors? Absolutely not!

Embrace change

Now here’s the hard part.

Change is good.

Track valid benchmarks: Tracking invalid data serves no purpose. Creating a brand new VALID benchmark serves a great purpose. Once you realize you’ve been tracking invalid data, it’s time to make a change and fix the problem. Similarly, once you realize you’ve missed answer options or used disrespectful language, it’s time to fix the problem.

Watch the world evolve: Change lets us account for our evolving society, culture, technology, and political atmosphere.

• When did you change the sex and/or gender questions on all of your studies to be more respectful and inclusive? If you haven’t done so yet, this PDF from Insights in Color will get you started.
• When did you add Facebook or Instagram as viable channels in addition to door-to-door salespeople, radio, and TV? Have you added TikTok to your list of channels yet? (You’d better!)
• When did you add Madonna to your list of influencers? What about Beyoncé? What about Billy Eilish?

You made those changes and didn’t think twice because it was the right thing to do it.

Plan to measure current issues: Build an entire section into your questionnaire that is all about change. If Section A is your unchangeable KPIs, make Section D completely new every single time. This quarter, it might be all about sustainability. Maybe next quarter it will be innovative packaging and the quarter after that will be all about diversity and equity.

Embrace fun! Change also lets us create questionnaires that are better able to capture the imagination of participants. Social networks and online games are fun because they leverage audio, video, swiping, and dragging. It’s time to change up your questionnaires so they are just as engaging.

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What’s next?

It’s time for researchers to stop being pushed around by trackers. We know what we’re trying to accomplish and why. We know how change affects data. It’s time for us to be the boss of trackers and make them work for us! Embrace change!

Are you ready to design a useful tracker that generates great quality data using questions that are inherently engaging? Email your project specifications to our research experts using Projects at E2Eresearch dot com!

Learn more from our case studies

• Tracking Customer Satisfaction Across 8 Countries
• Tracking Physician Perceptions of Diabetes Pharmaceutical Representatives

Download information about our services

• Launching Your Tracker with E2E Research  
• Data Quality Processes for Questionnaires 
• Engaging Question Design that Turn Boring into WOW!

Collision 2021 was a four-day, North American tech conference that drew more than 38 000 attendees. I was fortunate to be one of those attendees this year thanks to a ticket kindly donated by ESOMAR. This year, the Collision Conference hosted more than 600 speakers from all walks of life. Just a few of those people included:

• Celebrities: Cindy Crawford, Meaningful Beauty; Maria Sharapova, Therbody; Ashton Kutcher, Sound Ventures; Ryan Reynolds, Mint Mobile
• CEOs and CMOs from global companies: Geoffrey Hinton, University of Toronto; Ukonwa Ojo, Amazon; Fiona Carter, Goldman Sachs; Martin Wildberger, Royal Bank of Canada
• Local and global community leaders: Jagmeet Singh, Leader of Canadian New Democrat Party; John Tory, Mayor of Toronto; Katie Porter, Representative at US House of Representatives; Lori Lightfoot, Mayor of Chicago
• And 13-year-old whiz kids whose expertise and speaking skills rivaled the most experienced speakers in attendance!

With hundreds of sessions running simultaneously (and literally colliding with each other!), it was easy to create a personalized stream of content, particularly since no matter the time, a great talk was always just beginning. The stream I created for myself focused on artificial intelligence, robotics, and innovation. Here are the key themes I took away.

Technology Leaders Must Prove Their Trust

People love their devices. We trust them to help us discover and buy products, make and take phone calls and text messages from our loved ones, and remind us about confidential meetings and doctor’s appointments. We trust our devices will work as expected when we need them to work. However, there is a trust problem and it doesn’t lie with the technology itself. It lies in the fact that we don’t trust the people behind our devices, neither the people building the devices nor our government leaders, to create and hold appropriate boundaries around privacy and security.

Companies build trust by having clear values and a clear mission grounded in being authentic, empathetic, transparent, and relatable. We learn to trust companies that shape our experiences in ways that are personalized but at the same time not creepy. We also learn who trust by witnessing which companies hold themselves fully and immediately accountable when they make mistakes. Companies that abuse these expectations will quickly find themselves speaking to a declining audience. A great way to think about trust is that every interaction a company has with a consumer is either a deposit or a withdrawal. You do good or you do bad. There is no neutral.

Robot, Cobots, and the Inevitable

Did you realize you already have robots in your home? If we follow the strict definition that any automatically operated machine that replaces people is a robot, then your electric toothbrush, your toaster, and your vacuum cleaner (even if it’s NOT a Roomba) are robots. We’re slowly getting used to the idea that robots don’t have to take a human shape to be called robots.

A newer take on robots is the idea of cobots. Unlike a lot of robots that run behind the scenes, collaborative robots are designed to interact directly with or next to people. While you may be nervous that robots or cobots will take your job, there are many good reasons to be excited about working with them. Not only do they easily take on jobs that are dull, dirty, and dangerous, they augment our skills and abilities and help us do our work better and with more agility. Robots make us physically stronger and mentally more agile. If we let them, they help us make truly better decisions.

As in the case of robots and cobots, if something is inevitable, get enthusiastic about it.

The Language of AI

One of the main complaints about artificial intelligence comes when it’s used as a substitute for people. For instance, researchers are actively working on building AI tools intended to serve as personal companions for people who are elderly or disabled, and counsellors for people who’ve experienced trauma. Isn’t that impersonal? Isn’t that disrespectful? Well, let’s consider it from a different angle.

Think about people who’ve experienced a life of trauma, a life wrecked by abuse, trafficking, trauma, or addiction. A life where people have repeatedly let them down and shown that they can’t be trusted. Those who’ve experienced trauma may find it particularly hard to trust new people and may be far more comfortable beginning their healing process by working with AI.

Think about people who have experienced a brain injury or deal with communication disabilities. Or people who aren’t using their native language. Or people who feel more comfortable communicating via email or text. We constantly hear that people should be treated in the way they want and prefer to be treated. That we need to increase accessibility. This could easily be AI.

Regardless of the initial need, we need to ensure that these AI communication tools demonstrate empathy and show respect. AI can’t replace human judgement but it can and should reflect good judgement.

What Does It Mean For Researchers

The research industry talks about trust all the time. We need research participants to trust us enough to share their most personal opinions, their most private click-paths, and their most unusual purchase behaviours. We need research tools that can effectively automate dull and error-prone research tasks leaving us with more time to do our jobs even better and make better decisions.

And we really need to focus on language. So much of our work revolves around language – writing questionnaires with respectful wording that everyone can understand, moderating focus groups that accommodate every participant, making the research space accessible to all.

I may not have attended a single market research talk but I did indeed come away with new perspectives that will make me rethink how I have conducted research in the past, and what I will do in the future.

It isn’t cheap to gain access to people to participate in research studies. It’s a necessary investment that researchers make so they can listen to and understand a carefully targeted set of people. In order to discover high quality, generalizable insights that can be converted into actionable outcomes, this investment needs to be protected. Here are five techniques you can use to protect your investment.

Digital Fingerprinting

In the research space, digital fingerprinting is used for two key reasons (though others exist). It can help prevent people from participating in a research project more than once, whether by accident or on purpose. And, it can also ensure that participants originate from the country we expect them to be in. Catching inappropriate participants early in the process helps keep research costs lower as we won’t end up paying for invalid completes. And, by preventing duplicate responses, validity and reliability of results are improved.

Digital fingerprinting happens behind the scenes automatically. It involves identifying a range of features on an individual’s computer or mobile device to create a unique, data-driven identifier. Features could include computer specifications such as operating systems, installed software, browsers, geography, domains, and ISPs.

Early Data Validation

There’s no such thing as a perfect questionnaire. Building questionnaires is a subjective process that incorporates both art and science. Even for experts, it’s a cumbersome and complicated task to ensure that every skip and logic criteria is correct and creates the desired flow for every single participant. Fortunately, we can save time and increase data quality by leveraging digital tools designed for early data validation.

As always, every questionnaire should be manually checked for logic errors. On top of that, early data validation tools can confirm the accuracy or identify logic errors during soft launches. Catching oddities early will permit revisions or fixes to be made in the questionnaire or the scripting before the entire sample receives a less than ideal questionnaire.

Increased Consistency

When research objectives require targeting a hard-to-reach sample of people, we might need to access participants from several sources. Multiple sources, multiple processes, multiple email systems…. that’s a recipe for confusion and error.

As researchers, we know that consistency is key – when participants receive different messages at different times and with different formatting, this can have a negative impact on the research results. If it’s a struggle to stay organized and maintain consistency with samples using disparate systems, take advantage of a Survey Link Management system.

Re-Screening

Re-screening is a tricky topic. Most panels screen their panelists at least annually on key demographic variables like age, gender, and region. However, people move from state to state, get married or divorced, have children, and change and lose jobs and income. And, it’s now becoming more common for people to feel comfortable about sharing a gender identity that isn’t what they previously shared.

As much as we want to make surveys shorter for panelists, we also need to recognize that people’s lives are bumpy roads. People change.

It’s always a good idea to re-screen potential participants on at least few key variables to ensure your investment still reflects the people you need to speak with.

Engaging Questionnaires

When online surveys first became available twenty years ago, researchers got excited about radio buttons, check boxes, and text boxes. Fast forward to today… and researchers are less excited but still focused on radio buttons and check boxes.

Think for a minute about the digital activities people love to spend time on today. Those games and social networks have no radio buttons or check boxes. They use drag and drop, flicking, and swiping. They’re filled with images, sounds, and video. They’re fun and entertaining.

Surveys could be like that too. If we want to ensure the people we’ve invited to complete our surveys actually follow through and complete those surveys, we need to create a research experience that encourages engagement. We need to take advantage of the advanced participant engagement tools that are available to us today. Let’s write questionnaires that look like they were built this year.

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In Conclusion

It takes a lot of expertise to curate customized solutions that fit specific research needs. When we put the time into curating a targeted group of participants, our investment needs to be protected by building participant engagement and data quality techniques into the survey process. This is how we will generate better quality outcomes and smarter business decisions.

If you’re ready to build a research study with great data quality, please feel free to email your project specifications to our research experts using Bids at E2Eresearch dot com.

Review our case studies

• Tracking Customer Satisfaction Across 8 Countries
• Increasing Customer Acceptance For Controversial Pet Food Format
• Benchmarking Brand Awareness and Competitive Brand Space

Sample Conferences

• SampleCon: May 16 to 18, 2022