Welcome back. Now, let's focus on market research surveys of various kinds. If you decide to do quantitative research, you'll most likely use surveys as part of your research plan. If you're looking to quantify a problem here, you've got to measure it. You have to collect information on the primary side. Surveys are the most popular way to do this. And surveys can be done in so many different ways. There are pros and cons of doing surveys in a particular way. However, surveys are one of the most common solutions, especially now in this digital age. After this lesson, you will be able to identify which tools you want to work with and conduct the survey for your quantitative research. Let's get started. In the past decade Internet Surveys have by far become the most common form of survey research. Before that, while still in use today, telephone surveys were used most often. Of course there are face to face and mail or paper and pencil survey approaches as well, but Internet Surveys are obviously very easy to conduct. Internet Surveys can be done with an organization's email or they can be conducted via an Internet research panel like Research Now our Survey Sampling where individuals are paid for their time and effort to participate in surveys. While there are Strengths and Weaknesses in every research tool, many organizations trade off the Weaknesses in favor of benefits. Internet surveys may have some biases, but are often far more affordable than other approaches. Surveys can be used in many situations. They are a great tool when you know something can be measured, and the respondent is willing to participate. Data can be quantified in opportunities extrapolated from what the data says from a quantitative perspective, which can be valuable in the decision making process. Also, there are opportunities to segment the data and compare with other segments or with past research. The ability to compare is a valuable benefit of surveys. I would recommend a survey over another methodology when I need clear, definitive, quantitative results here and I need a number, basically. Or I need a number I can compare against a different segment of the population. Or I need a number that could be compared against a similar survey over a period of time. I talked about Net Promoter Score earlier in the course. A Net Promoter Score would be part of the survey. It's basically a handful of questions that can be asked to come up with a score that can be compared against another's Net Promoter Score. There's a lot of Net Promoter research on the Internet right now, and it's published out there. And you could actually compare your Net Promoter Score against an industry average for the industry that you work in, or even specific companies who publish their Net Promoter Score. There are companies that are very religious about their Net Promoter Scores. They track them over time to make sure they don't move down or they try to influence them by moving them up. They also look at Net Promoter Scores by segment. They may want to see what young people say compared to maybe what boomers say or give them for a Net Promoter Score. And so the only way you can actually quantify and compare accurately is by using a survey method. You can't do it qualitatively because there's just too much wiggle room and too much margin of error. You would consider using a survey if the respondent group or sample members can easily and accurately answer the questions. Making survey questions that can easily be understood by the public can be challenging. You've got to assume a 5th grade level of education when writing your questions. Your wording should be done in a way where a person easily understands if they read it or if it's read to them. A 5th grade level education will cover about 98 or 99% of the US population, in terms of understanding. This is a guideline when writing survey questions. There's a lot of debate about designing a good question and there needs to be care and consideration about designing a good question. Most people will design a survey question with the population or target in mind. However, when you design a survey question to make it easy to understand, there are a lot of rules to follow. There are rules regarding use of active and passive voice. There are rules around simplifying compound questions. You shouldn't include jargon or acronyms. You should not word a question with a negative, or write it in a way that influences the response in a particular way. There are many rules to follow in terms of making questions easy so you can accurately extract information from them. You will have a lesson on writing survey questions in the quantitative course of this specialization. I think it really comes down to creating a survey where most people will be able to understand and answer a very standard question you devise. When creating surveys, there's a lot of debate in terms of scales as well, based on how you ask questions. People understand 1 through 10 pretty easily. On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate this? This is pretty uniform across our population, because we have five fingers on one hand. We have 10 fingers overall for most of us, then 10 fingers, 10 toes. That's a good measure or a standard measure, and therefore people understand it in terms of a survey scale. However, there are cases where you can Strongly agree, Somewhat agree, Neither agree nor disagree, Somewhat disagree, and Strongly disagree. You need to put these types of questions in context to the situation. It's not going to work all the time and sometimes people kind of stretch things out in terms of their scales. And they make no sense at all, so as a result the accuracy fails. Another challenge that's really difficult to address is when people do research on children. Sometimes it's not easy to get and also the information may not be accurate. Sometimes you can't measure the exact read on terms of toy preference. There is a lot of really brilliant companies out there that do research in a particular way on children. They develop experiments and they get them to respond with happy faces, sad faces in terms of scales. That might be strong enough to get the response accurately. They also may have to structure a market research study that goes not only after children but after their parents. Because parents are ultimately the purchasers of items for children. You need to look at this from a lot of different levels. The elderly are the same thing. If you're testing a type of prescription drug, for example, in terms of preference and in terms of television, there may be a high viewership of television and you ask that person that fits in a certain age demographic what their response would be. It might be a little more difficult in terms of getting the response that you are looking for. Or to getting accuracy across the board. So as you can see, there are definitely Pros and Cons of doing surveys in a particular way. However, hopefully now you have a better idea of which tools that you want to work with and conduct a survey for your quantitative research.
