Author Archive: Phil G

Now that the campaigns have officially come to a close, and the election results are in, we finally have our moment of truth here at SurveyMonkey for how closely our polling data estimated the actual election results.

So, without further …

Last week, we unveiled a special project we’ve been working on–our effort to estimate voting preferences in the upcoming election.

We reported that of the 810,477 likely voters who completed the survey, 47.1% planned on voting for Barack Obama and 45.2% planned …

Picture this. You’re curled up in bed watching the nightly news…“Obama is leading in the polls!” says a pundit decisively. When a commercial comes on, you change the channel. “Romney has a massive lead in the polls!” says another pundit …

Often, all researchers see when evaluating the outcome of a study are survey results. Underneath any mean, however, there are genuine responses, as well as those that were made haphazardly, without careful thought. We explain the havoc these satisficers can …

When creating questions for your survey, you may be tempted to put them in matrix grids. After all, they’re faster and easier to create, and studies have found that respondents fill them out more quickly. The problem, however, is that …

Two weeks ago, I attended the ESOMAR 3D conference. About half of the conference was dedicated to presentations that focused on an emerging method to get people more engaged as research study participants. Another set of presentations looked to social …

The center of any scientific endeavor typically features two smaller questions; a) are these two groups different and b) how would we know if any differences we observe are actually real? For example, if group A has a mean of …

Panels.  An entire industry exists solely for the purposes of providing interviewees to survey researchers. Each firm has its own way of recruiting people to take surveys and those differences do, in fact, cause differences in the data. So the …

Don’t know whether to include a “Don’t Know” (or “Not Applicable”) response option for one of your questions? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Here are some do’s and don’ts.

The debate about whether to include a “Don’t Know” (DK) …

Everyone would like response rates to be as close to 100% as possible.  Higher response rates mean we bother fewer people while carrying out our research, and typically our costs of gathering those responses decline accordingly. Response rates are often …