- February 2012
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Black and White Moving Pictures.
- Evidence-based evaluation is getting everywhere, even into NGO development work amongst the poorest people on the planet. I was asked to design a survey programme for a major project in Mozambique. Only as I worked through the stages did I begin to realise just how much of my original design was based on assumptions....which bore little relation to reality. Be warned!
Click here to read the full report [PDF]
- January 2011
Watcha mean.....and a Happy New Year?
- One thing the research business must not get itself involved in is the PM’s crusade to measure happiness. Just ask yourself the following question; if Bhutan is the only country on earth to measure its success by tracking happiness over the last 50 years, why aren’t we all rushing to live there? Because what might make a Bhutanese happy will probably not make a Briton happy. And there’s the rub...
Click here to read the full report [PDF]
- December 2010
The cuts? Just put on a brave face.
- Isn’t it a bit curious that people are talking more and more these days about ‘value for money’ and ‘fit for purpose’ surveys in the public sector now that there is a recession and the big budget cuts have at last been announced? I would have thought that such aims should be embedded in the survey (or any other business) process regardless of the economic climate. But of course, the issue is not about the surveys themselves, it’s about...
Click here to read the full report [PDF]
- November 2010
The ideal questionnaire.
- At one of my recent talkshops someone asked me to give them an example of the ‘ideal questionnaire’. Good call! But what did occur to me was that for many practitioners and commissioners of research the problem is not simply one of questionnaire design rather it is one of questionnaire positioning. So.....
Click here to read the full report [PDF]
- August 2010
Quality enhancement in Higher and Further Education; grooming the growers in the groves of Academe.
- Clearly, deep down, nobody really likes to have their performance assessed, either at work or at home or at play. However, I am a bit surprised to come across this in the field of education where the concepts of evidence-based deduction, testing, examining, comparing, marking and correcting are all fundamental parts of the teaching process. Surely Kierkegaarde was right...
Click here to read the full report [PDF]
- July 2010
Hard to reach groups.....really?
- Clients can be unrealistically demanding at times; like when they want a survey which is representative and which also seeks to encompass 'hard to reach' groups.
Click here to read the full report [PDF]
- April 2010
Reporting: "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever"
- In my younger days I justified letting clients see the pain and suffering that had gone into their thirty page report by claiming that 'Unless you dive for the oysters of knowledge you will never appreciate their pearls of wisdom'.....so, forget an exec. summary at the front and read the whole thing! Now I know better.
Click here to read the full report [PDF]
- March 2010
Piloting.... flying the plane, or parking the boat?
- I sometimes wonder why some clients place so much emphasis on piloting their questionnaires. We may have gone through numerous drafts, the 'final' may have gone all the way up the client's sometimes very slow and tortuous decision-making process, and then just as fieldwork is about to get under way, then they ask "What about piloting the questionnaire?".
Click here to read the full report [PDF]
- January 2010
Tripping up in travel surveys
- No doubt because there has always been so much data publicly and freely available in the sector, public transport survey research has long been in the vanguard of consumer behaviour analysis, demand modelling and forecasting, and economic evaluation...But...some of the fundamental units of analysis are starting to be mis-used, or used sloppily.
Click here to read the full report [PDF]
- December 2009
The quota quandary: some preselected random thoughts on quotas.....and Donald Rumsfeld :
- ...Such brutal economics means that many if not most surveys aim for the minimum accepted threshold, normally around 1000 interviews; and what this actually implies is that when designing a survey, and devising its fieldwork strategy, the key issue becomes not the size but rather the composition of the achieved sample.
Click here to read the full report [PDF]
- October 2009
The open-ender; an easy option or a missed opportunity? :
- Sometimes when drafting a questionnaire you can find.....that things are becoming just too complicated....so, what do you do? Well many is the time that researchers respond by inserting an open-ended question. Any many is the time that the analysis of the reponses....yields nothing but confusion and heartache. Why is this?
Click here to read the full report [PDF]
- September 2009
Citizens’ Panels....beat them or join them? :
- Longitudinal, or panel, surveys always seem like an excellent idea.....until you try to do one. In theory they tick all the boxes and might even appear relatively cheap; in practice they tend to be a nightmare. The good thing is that in the public sector the infatuation with panel surveys, the coveting of the citizens’ panel, might be on the wane...
Click here to read the full report [PDF]
- August 2009
Recession and research :
- I think that the so-called 'credit crunch' is not our real problem; it is simply the most recent and most widely-publicised symptom of a much longer term malaise which has been affecting the UK economy for the last forty years. The UK may be hit more than other countries but this is not because of the importance which the City attaches to itself, it goes much deeper than that...
Click here to read the full report [PDF]
- July 2009
Incentives :
- It never ceases to amaze me how, whenever setting about doing a postal survey, clients always ask about incentives. It’s not a major issue when we are doing telephone or household surveys, so why does it always crop up with postal ones?
Click here to read the full report [PDF]
- May 2009
Survey Fatigue :
- We are moving deeper and deeper into the realms of evidence-based policy and decision making. For many, particularly in the public sector, such ‘evidence’ is amassed via survey research. But very often public sector survey buyers worry that they might be ‘achieving’ disappointing response rates because of what they term ‘survey fatigue’.
Click here to read the full report [PDF]
- April 2009
The pre-commissioning client-agency relationship :
- Agencies spend thousands of pounds each year preparing proposals to submit in response to invitations to tender and clients’ briefs: a good agency may win one in three of its proposals. And, at the end of the day, all this effort is paid for by commissioners through the fees they pay to the successful bidders, hence it is in everyone’s interest to have a tendering process which is as cost effective as possible – so how can we do this?
Click here to read the full report [PDF]
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