One of the interesting presentations at yesterday's Puget Sound Research Forum conference was from LinkedIn, covering their recently introduced sample services. Key advantages for sample from LinkedIn as I see it: Profiling information is entered by the LinkedIn user for reasons unconnected with survey taking. Regardless of of how much of a [...]

As a tea-drinking Brit I was fascinated by a study about tea drinking in Northern Iran concluding that drinking very hot tea is strongly associated with higher risk of oesophageal cancer. Digging in further, I was struck by a number of points: The article I first noticed, by Karen Kaplan of the Los Angeles Times, was very clearly written and didn’t mangle the facts or interpretations. Such clarity is unusual and deserves a commendation. [...]

Business people generally know that satisfying customers is a good thing, but they don’t necessarily understand the link between satisfaction and profits. This is partly because much of the original work was done so long ago that contradictory cases and nuances have created confusion to build up. Additionally, some companies have appeared successful for a time despite poor satisfaction, generally in industries where there is limited or no competition such as airlines. But [...]

It shouldn't be a surprise that Nate Silver (statistics whizkid behind FiveThirtyEight.com which did an outstanding job of predicting the results of the 2008 election) is turning his attention to matters other than politics.   After all, before he became a political pundit his forte was baseball statistics. If you want to read the published predictions head over to the [...]

I just came across an interesting issue with validation in an online survey using a Van Westendorp pricing model.  Van Westendorp is one of the common ways to test pricing by directly questioning prospective purchasers.  This post isn't about Van Westendorp, also known as the Price Sensitivity Meter (you can find plenty of references online, including  a starting point on Wikipedia) but you [...]

I had decided not to comment on political polling during this election season. Although this post concerns the election, it isn't about polling. It isn't directly about research, but it does show the problems that can happen when numeric results are reported imperfectly, and, even more important, when reporting on the report confuses instead of clarifying. Today (10/7/08), I read a snippet from the Puget Sound Business Journal "Washington State Voter Registration hits 3.5 [...]

The Pew Research Center has tracked broadband adoption for several years; the most recent study shows that the adoption rate has dropped. As of April 2008, 55% of the adults in the U.S. have access to broadband at home, with just 10% using dial-up connections. As you might imagine, broadband usage is unevenly distributed. People living in rural areas are less likely to have a high speed connection, as are lower income and African Americans (Hispanic broadband access is similar to the overall [...]

I asked myself this question the first time I saw a survey invitation with the following warning: Please note, this survey contains media that is not compatible with Firefox Internet Browser The invitation continued with instructions to copy and paste the link into an Internet Explorer window if Firefox is my default browser. Let's look at this in more detail. To dispose of the [...]