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Approval Ratings: How They’re Measured and Interpreted
The Gallup Organization began measuring approval ratings in the late 1930s to gauge how much public support a president had for the way he was doing his job. Approval rating surveys measure public evaluations of a politician, institution, policy, or public figure, as well as judgments on public issues. Ratings rise and fall with the…
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Stay Interviews: The Conversation That Prevents an Exit Interview
What Is a Stay Interview? A stay interview is a periodic, structured one-on-one conversation between a manager and an employee. Its purpose is to find out why the employee chooses to stay with the organization and what might eventually cause them to leave. Stay interviews show organizations what they are doing right, where they are…
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Criterion Validity Explained for Survey Researchers
You have a number from a survey. How can you be sure that number means anything? Take two surveys that both measure employee engagement. Each asks new employees to rate how engaged they are on a scale of 1 to 10. Both produce clean charts and statistics that appear to support conclusions about employee engagement.…
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Psychological Reactance: Why Required Fields Make People Rebel
When you make a survey question required and look at the results, you’ll notice that some people answer it thoughtfully. Others type “N/A,” mash their keyboards, or enter false information just to get past the question and out of the survey. They were told the information was required, and some part of them pushed back…
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The Wisdom of Crowds: When Averaging Survey Guesses Beats the Experts
Wisdom of crowd or wisdom of the majority according to Wikipedia expresses the notion that the collective opinion of a diverse and independent group of individuals rather than that of a single expert yields the best judgement. Wisdom of crowds does not mean crowds are more intelligent than experts, rather it works best when the…
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The Third-Person Effect: Why Everyone Thinks Ads Work on Other People
Do you think other people are more influenced by advertising and media messages than you are? This belief illustrates the third-person effect, a psychological phenomenon in which people tend to believe that media messages influence others more strongly than they influence themselves. Although people may recognize that advertising, news, and persuasive messages affect others, they…
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Agent-Based Modeling and Surveys: A Detailed Guide
Imagine you have just completed a large-scale survey. The data looks exciting. Clean lines, sharp charts, solid quantitative insights. Then a question pops into your head. What happens next? Will respondents actually act the way they described? What if their conditions change? What if a new competitor springs up, a government changes, or a policy…
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What are Proto Personas In Market Research?
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What UX Research Screeners Are and Why They Matter
Imagine spending three weeks recruiting participants for a usability study of your mobile banking app. On test day, you discover that half of them have never used mobile banking. Two only bank in person. One signed up because the incentive looked good. The sessions still happen. The data still comes in. But none of it…
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What Is the Ecological Fallacy in Research? Examples & How to Avoid It
Imagine a country with a low literacy rate and a low average income. It feels natural to assume that every illiterate person there earns very little. But that assumption is wrong, and it has a name: the ecological fallacy. The ecological fallacy, sometimes called the population fallacy, is the error of applying a group-level finding…