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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Excuse me while I vomit.

Protip: just because you’ve somehow managed to combine some letters to form some words and you’ve placed radio buttons alongside them doesn’t mean you’ve created a poll.
Bonus protip: you can see research that’s just as bad (but generally a lot less offensive) on the home pages of most every local TV station, newspaper, and radio [...]

Meanwhile, Deep in John Zogby’s Secret Underground Lair/Science Lab…

I’m not the first one to see this, but that never stopped me before; everyone loves a good dogpile.
The Borg Collective fine people at Zogby Interactive just asked me this interesting set of questions:

What the hell are they working on up there in Utica?