Anyone can write a survey, but not everyone can do it well. The ‘rubbish in, rubbish out’ philosophy is important to understand when it comes to market research, as the insights are only as good as the questions you ask. In a recent article for Marketing Week, Mark Ritson espoused the benefits of using qualitative research to identify the appropriate variables to ask consumers about, and only then using quantitative surveys to measure the outcomes. This ensures you’re asking consumers their opinion about the things most relevant and important to them, rather than the things you think matter. Ensuring your questions are an accurate reflection of consumers’ world view is of course critical. But the way you ask the question also matters, as a recent experiment by CoreData with nearly 2,000 Australians found. We tested the impact of two commonly used question formats on survey responses, the multiple-choice and the forced-choice question types, and found they produced very different results.
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