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By Jon Kulok on August 1, 2014
Welcome to the Edge blog. I’m Jon Kulok, one of the Principals at Edge Research, and a few times a month, Edge will offer perspectives and insights into market research, data analysis, survey research — anything interesting that somehow touches (no matter how tangentially) the sphere in which we do our work. If you want to know more about me, click here.
I didn’t plan to join the blogger set. Over the years, I’ve been known to share an inordinate number of articles with work colleagues. Clients would occasionally ask me how I was able to pull in information from disparate sources and transform it into a coherent thesis. I simply shrugged and said I read a lot. Finally, one of my clients and our new COO recently mentioned that my musings would make an excellent blog. So, here it is.
The current plan is to offer two or three brief missives that I find interesting in each entry. My Edge colleagues may contribute as well, as we all look for inspiration and innovation from various sources. After week one, the posts will try to have a similar theme, although depending on the feedback we receive all of this could change. We are researchers after all. So…
Innovative Techniques and Multivariate Data
I thoroughly enjoyed The Monkey Cage post at The Washington Post that had the eye-catching headline “The Less Americans Know about Ukraine’s Location, The More They Want U.S. to Intervene.”
To be clear, I don’t need another survey to tell me that American geographic literacy is horrible. Rather, I enjoyed this information because the methodological approach was innovative and generated meaningful insights — asking respondents in an online survey to literally identify Ukraine on a map and then using regression analysis to illustrate how the desire for military action correlates strongly with an inability to locate the country. While the saying may be “Ignorance is bliss,” this study may hasten the need to change it to “Ignorance yields the desire for military action, with statistical significance.” I admit the language needs some work…
Excellent Data Synthesis at 538
As someone who has been accused on more than one occasion of being egocentric, I got a kick out of the following piece on Nate Silver’s site 538. It looks like a lot of us are really enamored with ourselves.
The author, Emma Pierson, does a marvelous job incorporating survey research data, DNA analysis from 23andMe.com (where she works), and in-person interviews to demonstrate that more often than not, it’s similarities not differences that attract us to mates.
BTW, geek-note: for any data-lovers, I highly recommend Emma’s blog “Obsession with Regression.”
Another Major Company Makes an Analytical Misstep
Earlier this week The Wall Street Journal ran a post showing that StubHub has seen a decline in sales after removing hidden fees.
This move was in response to consumer surveys, which showed that “hidden pricing” represented customers’ biggest complaints. Yet, since they made this move, revenue is down dramatically. This is not the first, nor will it be the last time, that a company will make an ill-advised decision off of customer surveys. We know that people are often poor reporters of their own behaviors. This is why we strongly rely on both direct AND indirect questioning techniques in pricing studies. We have also found choice-based methodological approaches, such as conjoint, to be much better at forecasting customer behavior. We plan to have much more to say on this, along with other fiascos such as Netflix at later date.
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