How Many Yards Do You Commute To Work, And Other Badly-Measured Intervals.

I’m really sorry I’ve been so dormant lately.  I don’t really have an excuse, other than that I’ve been busy enough with other things that I haven’t been taking many online surveys, and as a result, I haven’t had anything to post.
Today, though, that changes. Hopefully for good? We’ll see.
So I watched an episode of [...]

Straightlining vs. Answering Your Stupid Question Honestly

OK, this is something I hadn’t thought of before.
When I’m staring at a bad survey question — asking me to compare two absolutely identical companies in a matrix, for instance — my tendency is to do this:

They’re equal. There’s no difference between Visa and MasterCard in my mind. Discover and American Express, those are different, [...]

Needs Moar Choices.

Seriously? Shouldn’t they also have broken out high school by year, or something? Maybe included a radio button for each individual year from kindergarten through law school? No, really, I just can’t imagine how such fine distinctions are useful to anyone. Is someone really looking at this and saying, “Wow, the 7 respondents with some [...]

Resident of What, Now?

Does anyone else have trouble answering this? I see it on nearly every Zogby Interactive poll I get, and I never know what to do with it:

I just don’t get it.
Maybe I’m overthinking it — it happens — but I can’t figure out exactly what the underlying idea of the question is. I get why [...]

Blank = Zero

Can we please just all agree that blank = zero?
Greenfield, unsurprisingly:

Come on, guys. Stop making things hard for respondents. It’s not like you have enough of them to begin with.

Zogby Motorcycle Emptiness

What fresh hell is this? John Zogby has discovered the matrix? And somehow made it uglier than any other matrix in the history of research? All true, and more on that in a moment, but first, this unusual use of the ticky box:

That’s probably illegible unless you click on it, but the gist is I’m [...]

Is it me?

You really want me to think about whether or not any of these refrigerated products could best be described as being “warm?” Because, ew.)

Best Buy Has Some Issues

From this story at The Consumerist. I’m sure it’s just a browser rendering issue that would have been solved with more testing, but right now, it’s just one of my all time favorite matrixes:

Well done, Best Buy!

SSI: Matrixes Make Us Cry, Too.

“We know respondents don’t like grids,” Jackie Lorch, SSI VP, Global Knowledge Management, points out. “They’ve been telling us that for years in focus groups and feedback, but we’ve always thought of grids as a necessary evil in questionnaire design. Now, we’re beginning to learn that not only are grids frustrating [...]

How Exactly Does One Trust a Brand of Razor?

This is probably a nitpick:

It’s bad enough when you ask me which brand of orange juice I trust most — though I can’t imagine why any nationally known brand of juice would be more or less “trustworthy” than any other — it’s not like I have reason to believe Tropicana’s short-lived carton redesign is indicative [...]