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, [...]

Another Fine Matrix

First, look at this full-size. See how there are 14 brands of cat food going across the top? I already told it I’d never heard of five of them, and yet here they all are again. It’s one thing to ask me if I’ve ever heard of a brand and to then, even if I [...]

Is the panel research business model creating a gold farming problem?

Greenfield must be having trouble getting panelists to complete research these days. Maybe it’s the summer blahs, with respondents too hot, too sweaty, or just too on vacation to be bothered.
Then again, maybe it’s something to do with people just getting sick of trying to imagine their orange juice has come to life and is [...]

Greenfield: They’re Just Weird. (And why are they plagiarizing recipes from the BBC?)

I don’t get it. The recipe, the quotation from Aristotle, the mountain climber — what does any of this this have to do with orange juice?

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.)

Sweet Fancy Matrix

In all seriousness, though: who decided that this was the way to determine what consumers truly think?

Greenfield Solves the Wrong Problem

So, I see Greenfield Online has gone and added a “security” question to their matrices to weed out people who pay no attention whatsoever. This, of course, is a predictable response to the somewhat misplaced industry obsession with the quality of online survey responses.
Oddly, though, they’ve gone and inserted this into a survey where I’m [...]

Eats, Shoots & Writes Online Polls for Greenfield

…an entire rant about the complete lack of proofreading, quality assurance, and consideration for user experience that has to exist in a corporate culture for something like this to ever be exposed to the general public…

Why We Fight

I think I need the occasional reminder that the point of this isn’t so much to point and laugh at Greenfield and other worthy targets, but instead that bad research needs to be eliminated, because it actually hurts us all.
What’s the long-term effect of Greenfield getting respondents to take survey after survey, in a never-ending [...]

Define “use.”

OK, 168 is probably an exaggeration; I do put my laptop to sleep when I go to bed. On the other hand, I have machines in the house that are always running, and generally serving something to somebody somewhere, so in that respect, I am using the internet.
Harris asks something similar, which I thought I’d [...]