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.”

Are consent forms slowing you down?

Say hello to Inscribee!

Most businesses have moved their standard contracts, including NDAs, MSAs, and SOWs, from paper and pencil signatures to digital signatures. Electronic or digital signatures are secure, legally binding, and traceable. And, they speed up business processes immensely.

We can easily do the same with research participant consent forms, whether in-person or online. For fieldwork managers and vendor managers, digital signatures are particularly convenient for handling lots of forms across multiple projects and facilities. Rather than trying to store reams of consent forms and other paper contracts in filing cabinets or gigabytes of files across multiple client folders, digital signature tools allow you to prepare, maintain, and track thousands of contracts in one spot.

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How can market researchers benefit from Inscribee?

In order to encourage openness and honesty from participants, researchers want the research experience to be as personal and friendly as possible. However, we also need to ensure that both the researcher and the research participant understand what will happen and what is expected of each party. Even though they feel formal and sometimes off-putting, contracts are unavoidable. What we can do is make sure the contract process is as simple and straightforward as possible.

• Mid-Survey Consent: Researchers often need to gain consent during the survey experience. However, traditional signature tools require participants to exit the survey, check their email, complete a form, email it back to someone, and then return to the survey. Ultimately, this leads to unnecessary dropouts as some people will simply quit or get distracted never to return to the survey. By embedding Inscribee within a questionnaire, participants can remain in the questionnaire throughout the entire research experience. You can collect hundreds or thousands of consent forms without forcing participants leave the survey.

• In-Person Consent: When people participate in mall intercepts or visit central location facilities to participate in focus groups, interviews, or other in-person events, researchers can avoid creating mounds of paper work by using Inscribee digital signatures. Inscribee allows the research team to collect signatures on the spot even if participants don’t have their own data-enabled digital device with them. Participants sign the document digitally on your device, whether that’s a mobile phone, tablet, or desktop computer. Participants can also provide an email address where they will receive the fully signed document.

• Reinforce Confidentiality: It’s nearly impossible to ‘force’ research participants to not share confidential information about products or concepts they see during research. However, creating a legally binding contract is a professional way to remind participants that the only way brands can continue to invite them to participate in these kinds of research projects is if they maintain confidentiality. A short one-page document signed by the research participant midway through a research study can remind them of what they agreed to prior to participating in the study.

• Supplementary Consent: Some exercises completed during a research study may require additional consent beyond what was originally planned. Perhaps you’ve decided to incorporate a video or audio question and need to confirm that participants understand how that data containing PII will be used. Or, perhaps a segment of people may be asked to participate in a follow-up interview. Inscribee can be embedded into the questionnaire prior to the supplementary ask to gain appropriate consent in a convenient way.

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How can business leaders benefit from Inscribee?

On top of being great for research fieldworkers and online questionnaire researchers, Inscribee simplifies the contracting process for business leaders, people leaders, and business development executives. It offers a full range of flexible features.

• Supports traditional PDF documents such as NDAs, SOWs, MOUs, MSAs, and SLAs
• Supports documents requiring one signature or many signatures
• Supports documents requiring multiple signatures within one company or across many companies
• Supports documents where the signees names and email addresses are known or not known
• Can be easily embedded onto websites to accept signatures from hundreds, thousands, or millions of website visitors, users, or customers
• Traceable, real-time tracking of signatures
• Accepts signatures on any internet enabled device without downloads or registrations

From pitch to repurchase, Inscribee speeds up and simplifies signature processes for business leaders.
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Click here to start your first free Inscribee document now!

Hosted by Jenn Vogel at Voxpopme, Reel Talk is a podcast designed to help researchers and marketers gain valuable information to help understand their customers better. Jenn and her guests discuss customer insights and how to use data to make better customer-centric decisions. You can catch all of the podcasts here.

In this episode from October 4, 2021, Jenn chats with Annie Pettit, our CEO, about techniques for designing better marketing research questionnaires.

Research Objective

• A leading healthcare technology company needed to identify existing product attributes within a product line that were not optimizing incremental customer reach.
• The focus was on both product features and offers.
• A survey would need to be designed, scripted, and fielded among healthcare professionals.

Scope & Methodology

• A MaxDiff and TURF analysis was required to identify the best/ideal set of product attributes and build an optimal model of product combinations/attributes that would reach the maximum number of unduplicated customers.
• After completing the analysis of the best product attributes, an interactive simulation of customer preferences was designed to observe all possible attribute combinations.

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Value Delivered

• As a result of these analyses, the client was able to build a more effective product line consisting of the most preferred product line while also maximizing customer reach.
• With this information, they determined that 90% of participants were very likely to purchase from this combination of product offerings.

Learn more

• Understanding Relative Importance of Healthcare Imaging Features for New Product Development – A survey + MaxDiff case study
• Optimizing Healthcare Technology Offerings to Avoid Cannibalization | A MaxDiff TURF case study
• Tips for the First-Time Conjoint Analysis Researcher

Research Objective

• An international brand of seasonings, instant soups, pasta, and noodles wished to satisfy Indian consumer needs with a product offering focused on balanced nutrition for young people.
• Their main objective was to deliver well balanced nutritional pasta that mothers could trust, and their children would like while maintaining the image of their brand and quality. This needed to hold true even when kids and teenagers ate the pasta without any vegetables or meat.
• They wanted to develop a pasta product which would find a balance between nutrition, taste, and visual signals that would make the product credible in the eyes of mothers and their children.

Scope & Methodology

• Experts conducted a Customer Need Assessment study with mothers to understand:
  • Perception towards pasta products
  • Preferred ingredients and additives
  • Taste and color improvements
  • Level of consumption
• Primary & Desk Research: We identified lentils, chickpeas, powdered egg whites, and flax seed as the best ingredients to achieve consumer nutritional objectives. These ingredients and additives were perceived to be nutritious and part of the healthy diet which fit well with the brand image.
• We also evaluated a range of several colors to find a shade of pasta that is not too dark for the kids but dark enough for the mothers to find it credible.

Value Delivered

• Our study helped the client to understand consumer perceptions towards their new product and identify their current needs for kids.
• Client introduced several new products in the pasta segment by considering consumer’s needs and demands.

Check out other food case studies

• Measuring Consumer Preferences for Successful Ready-To-Eat Development | A Sensory Research Case Study
• Benchmarking Brand Awareness and Competitive Brand Space – A consumer food survey case study
• Sentiment and Content Analysis of Qualitative Consumer Comments – A food survey + text analysis case study

Research Objective

• A leading food company wanted to understand the sales impact of various trade schemes.
• They wanted to deconstruct sales in order to differentiate the impact of various schemes (lift analysis) and to understand how price, promotion, schemes,and competition activity impacted sales.

Scope & Methodology

• Created multiple regression models for key SKUs to determine the impact of trade promotions, slab based discounts, internal cannibalization, competition activity and seasonality on their overall sales
• Calculated sales lift & ROI for each promotion to help optimize budget allocation

Value Delivered

• A scheme simulator was built that allowed the business team to align their trade promotion calendar to meet budget constraints and achieve the desired sales lift for their portfolio.
• The simulator now guides future investment decisions.

Check out other retail case studies

• Consumer Perceptions Towards Online Ordering – A retail survey + desk research case study
• Launching a Fast Food Franchise In A Competitive Market – A retail survey + competitive analysis case study
• Improving Operational Effectiveness at a CPG Company – A retail B2B survey case study