Archive Page 2

The Insight that Insights Technology is Missing

Published June 1, 2022 DIY Tools , Election polling , Insights Technology , Methodology , Response Rates , Statistics and probability Leave a Comment
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The market research insights industry has long been characterized by a resistance to change. This likely results from the academic nature of what we do. We don’t like to adopt new ways of doing things until they have been proven and studied.

I would posit that the insights industry has not seen much change since the transition from telephone to online research occurred in the early 2000s. And even that transition created discord within the industry, with many traditional firms resistant to moving on from telephone studies because online data collection had not been thoroughly studied and vetted.

In the past few years, the insights industry has seen an influx of capital, mostly from private equity and venture capital firms. The conditions for this cash infusion have been ripe: a strong and growing demand for insights, a conservative industry that is slow to adapt, and new technologies arising that automate many parts of a research project have all come together simultaneously.

Investing organizations see this enormous business opportunity. Research revenues are growing, and new technologies are lowering costs and shortening project timeframes. It is a combustible business situation that needs a capital accelerant.

Old school researchers, such as myself, are becoming nervous. We worry that automation will harm our businesses and that the trend toward DIY projects will result in poor-quality studies. Technology is threatening the business models under which we operate.

The trends toward investment in automation in the insights industry are clear. Insights professionals need to embrace this and not fight it.

However, although the movement toward automation will result in faster and cheaper studies, this investment ignores the threats that declining data quality creates. In the long run, this automation will accelerate the decline in data quality rather than improve it.

It is great that we are finding ways to automate time-consuming research tasks, such as questionnaire authoring, sampling, weighting, and reporting. This frees up researchers to concentrate on drawing insights out of the data. But, we can apply all the automation in the world to the process, yet if we do not do something about data quality, it will not increase the value clients receive.

I argue in POLL-ARIZED that the elephant in the research room is the fact that very few people want to take our surveys anymore. When I began in this industry, I routinely fielded telephone projects with 70-80% response rates. Currently, telephone and online response rates are between 3-4% for most projects.

Response rates are not everything. You can make a compelling argument that they do not matter at all. There is no problem as long as the 3-4% response we get is representative. I would rather have a representative 3% answer a study than a biased 50%.

But, the fundamental problem is that this 3-4% is not representative. Only about 10% of the US population is currently willing to take surveys. What is happening is that this same 10% is being surveyed repeatedly. In the most recent project Crux fielded, respondents had taken an average of 8 surveys in the past two weeks. So, we have about 10% of the population taking surveys every other day, and our challenge is to make them represent the rest of the population.

Automate all you want, but the data that are the backbone of the insights we are producing quickly and cheaply is of historically low quality.

The new investment flooding into research technology will contribute to this problem. More studies will be done that are poorly designed, with long, tortuous questionnaires. Many more surveys will be conducted, fewer people will be willing to take them, and response rates will continue to fall.

There are plenty of methodologists working on these problems. But, for the most part, they are working on new ways to weight the data we can obtain rather than on ways to compel more response. They are improving data quality, but only slightly, and the insights field continues to ignore the most fundamental problem we have: people do not want to take our surveys.

For the long-term health of our field, that is where the investment should go.

In POLL-ARIZED, I list ten potential solutions to this problem. I am not optimistic that any of them will be able to stem the trend toward poor data quality. But, I am continually frustrated that our industry has not come together to work towards expanding respondent trust and the base of people willing to take part in our projects.

The trend towards research technology and automation is inevitable. It will be profitable. But, unless we address data quality issues, it will ultimately hasten the decline of this field.

POLL-ARIZED available on May 10

Published April 21, 2022 Address Based Samples , DIY Tools , Election polling , Marketing , Methodology , Quality Checks , Response Rates , Statistics and probability 2 Comments
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I’m excited to announce that my book, POLL-ARIZED, will be available on May 10.
 
After the last two presidential elections, I was fearful my clients would ask a question I didn’t know how to answer: “If pollsters can’t predict something as simple as an election, why should I believe my market research surveys are accurate?”
 
POLL-ARIZED results from a year-long rabbit hole that question led me down! In the process, I learned a lot about why polls matter, how today’s pollsters are struggling, and what the insights industry should do to improve data quality.
 
I am looking for a few more people to read an advance copy of the book and write an Amazon review on May 10. If you are interested, please send me a message at poll-arized@cruxresearch.com.

Questions You Are Not Asking Your Market Research Supplier That You Should Be Asking

Published March 7, 2022 Marketing , Methodology , Quality Checks , Response Rates Leave a Comment
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It is no secret that providing representative samples for market research projects has become challenging. While clients are always focused on obtaining respondents quickly and efficiently, it is also important that they are concerned with the quality of their data. The reality is that quality is slipping.

While there are many causes of this, one that is not discussed much is that clients rarely ask their suppliers the tough questions they should. Clients are not putting pressure on suppliers to focus on data quality. Since clients ultimately control the purse strings of projects, suppliers will only improve quality if clients demand it.

I can often tell if I have an astute client by their questions when we are designing studies. Newer or inexperienced clients tend to start by talking about the questionnaire topics. Experienced clients tend to start by talking about the sample and its representativeness.

Below is a list of a few questions that I believe clients should be asking their suppliers on every study. The answers to these are not always easy to come by, but as a client, you want to see that your supplier has contemplated these questions and pays close attention to the issues they highlight.

For each, I have also provided a correct or acceptable answer to expect from your supplier.

  • What was the response rate to my study? While it was once commonplace to report response rates, suppliers try to dodge this issue. Most data quality issues stem from low response rates. Correct Answer: For most studies, under 5%. Unless the survey is being fielded among a highly engaged audience, such as your customers, you should be suspicious of any answer over 15%. “I don’t know” is an unacceptable answer. Suppliers will also try to convince you that response rates do not matter when every data quality issue we experience stems from inadequate response to our surveys.
  • How many respondents did you remove in fielding for quality issues? This is an emerging issue. The number of bad-quality respondents in studies has grown substantially in just the last few years. Correct answer: at least 10%, but preferably between 25% and 40%. If your supplier says 0%, you should question whether they are properly paying attention to data quality issues. I would guide you to find a different supplier if they cannot describe a process to remove poor-quality respondents. There is no standard way of doing this, but each supplier should have an established process.
  • How were my respondents sourced? This is an essential question seldom asked unless our client is an academic researcher. It is a tricky question to answer. Correct answer: This is so complicated that I have difficulty providing a cogent response to our clients. Here, the hope is that your supplier has at least some clue as to how the panel companies get their respondents and know who to go to if a detailed explanation is needed. They should connect you with someone who can explain this in detail.
  • What are you doing to protect against bots? Market research samples are subject to the ugly things that happen online – hackers, bots, cheaters, etc. Correct answer: Something proactive. They might respond that they are working with the panel companies to prevent bots or a third-party firm to address this. If they are not doing anything or don’t seem to know that bots are a big issue for surveys, you should be concerned.
  • What is in place to ensure that my respondents are not being used for competitors or vice-versa? Often, clients should care that the people answering their surveys have not done another project in your product category recently. I have had cases where two suppliers working for the same client (one being us) used the same sample source and polluted the sample base for both projects because we did not know the other study was fielding. Correct answer: Something if this is important to you. If your research covers brand or advertising awareness, you should account for this. If you are commissioning work with several suppliers, this takes considerable coordination.
  • Did you run simulated data through my survey before fielding? This is an essential, behind-the-scenes step that all suppliers that know what they are doing take. Running thousands of simulated surveys through the questionnaire tests survey logic and ensures that the right people get to the right questions. While it doesn’t prevent all errors, it catches many of them. Correct answer: Yes. If the supplier does not know what simulated data is, it is time to consider a new supplier.
  • How many days will my study be in the field? Many errors in data quality stem from conducting studies too quickly. Correct answer: Varies, but this should be 10-21 days for a typical project. If your study better have difficult-to-find respondents, this could be 3-4 weeks. If the data collection period is shorter than ten days, you WILL have data quality errors that arise, so be sure you understand the tradeoffs for speed. Don’t insist on field speed unless you need to.
  • Can I have a copy of the panel company’s answers to the ESOMAR questions? ESOMAR has put out a list of questions to help buyers of online samples. Every sample supplier worth using will have created a document that answers these questions. Correct answer: Yes. Do not work with a company that has not put together a document answering these questions, as all the good ones have. However, after reading this document, don’t expect to understand how your respondents are being sourced.
  • How do you handle requests down the road when the study is over? It is a longstanding pet peeve of most clients that suppliers charge for basic customer support after the project is over. Make sure you have set expectations properly upfront and put these expectations into the contract. Correct answer: Forever. Our company only charges if support requests become substantial. Many suppliers will provide support for three- or six months post-study and will charge for this support. I have never understood this, as I am flattered when a client calls me to discuss a study that was done years ago, as this means our study is continuing to make an impact. We do not charge for this follow-up unless the request requires so much time that we have to.

There are probably many other questions clients should be asking suppliers. Clients need to get tougher on insisting on data quality. It is slipping, and suppliers are not investing enough to improve response rates and develop trust with respondents. If clients pressure them, the economic incentives will be there to create better techniques to obtain quality research data.

Let’s Appreciate Statisticians Who Make Data Understandable

Published January 19, 2022 Election polling , Marketing , Methodology , Statistics and probability , Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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Statistical analyses are amazing, underrated tools. All scientific fields depend on discoveries in statistics to make inferences and draw conclusions. Without statistics, advances in engineering, medicine, and science that have greatly improved the quality of life would not have been possible. Statistics is the Rodney Dangerfield of academic subjects – it never gets the respect it deserves.

Statistics is central to market research and polling. We use statistics to describe our findings and understand the relationships between variables in our data sets. Statistics are the most important tools we have as researchers.

However, we often misuse these tools. I firmly believe that pollsters and market researchers overdo it with statistics. Basic, statistical analyses are easy to understand, but complicated ones are not. Researchers like to get into complex statistics because it lends an air of expertise to what we do.

Unfortunately, most sophisticated techniques are impossible to convey to “normal” people who may not have a statistical background, and this tends to describe the decision-makers we support.

I learned long ago that when working with a dataset, any result that will be meaningful will likely be uncovered by using simple descriptive statistics and cross-tabulations. Multivariate techniques can tease out more subtle relationships in the data. Still, the clients (primarily marketers) we work with are not looking for subtleties – they want some conclusions that leap off the page from the data.

If a result is so subtle that it needs complicated statistics to find, it is likely not a large enough result to be acted upon by a client.

Because of this, we tend to use multivariate techniques to confirm what we see with more straightforward methods. Not always – as there are certainly times when the client objectives call for sophisticated techniques. But, as researchers, our default should be to use the most straightforward designs possible.

I always admire researchers who make complicated things understandable. That should be the goal of statistical analyses. George Terhanian of Electric Insights has developed a way to use sophisticated statistical techniques to answer some of the most fundamental questions a marketer will ask.

In his article “Hit? Stand? Double? Master’ likely effects’ to make the right call”, George describes his revolutionary process. It is sophisticated behind the scenes, but I like the simplicity in the questions it can address.

He has created a simulation technique that makes sense of complicated data sets. You may measure hundreds of things on a survey and have an excellent profile of the attitudes and behaviors of your customer base. But, where should you focus your investments? This technique demonstrates the likely effects of changes.

As marketers, we cannot directly increase sales. But we can establish and influence attitudes and behaviors that result in sales. Our problem is often to identify which of these attitudes and behaviors to address.

For instance, if I can convince my customer base that my product is environmentally responsible, how many of them can I count on to buy more of my product? The type of simulator described in this article can answer this question, and as a marketer, I can then weigh if the investment necessary is worth the probable payoff.

George created a simulator on some data from a recent Crux Poll. Our poll showed that 17% of Americans trust pollsters. George’s analysis shows that trust in pollsters is directly related to their performance in predicting elections.

Modeling the Crux Poll data showed that if all Americans “strongly agreed” that presidential election polls do a good job of predicting who will win, trust in pollsters/polling organizations would increase by 44 million adults. If Americans feel “extremely confident” that pollsters will accurately predict the 2024 election, trust in pollsters will increase by an additional 40 million adults.

If we are worried that pollsters are untrusted, this suggests that improving the quality of our predictions should address the issue.

Putting research findings in these sorts of terms is what gets our clients’ attention. 

Marketers need this type of quantification because it can plug right into financial plans. Researchers often hear that the reports we provide are not “actionable” enough. There is not much more actionable than showing how many customers would be expected to change their behavior if we successfully invest in a marketing campaign to change an attitude.

Successful marketing is all about putting the probabilities in your favor. Nothing is certain, but as a marketer, your job is to decide where best place your resources (money and time). This type of modeling is a step in the right direction for market researchers.

Associations and Trade Groups for Market Researchers and Pollsters

Published December 8, 2021 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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The market research and polling fields have some excellent trade associations. These organizations help lobby for the industry, conduct studies on issues relating to research, host in-person events and networking opportunities, and post jobs in the market research field. They also host many excellent online seminars. These organizations establish standards for research projects and codes of conduct for their memberships.

Below is a listing of some of the most influential trade groups for market researchers and pollsters. I would recommend that, at minimum, all researchers should get on the email lists of these organizations, as that allows you to see what events and seminars they have coming up. Many of their online seminars are free.

  • ESOMAR. ESOMAR is perhaps the most “worldwide” of all the research trade associations and probably the biggest. ESOMAR was established in 1948 and is headquartered in Europe (Amsterdam). With 40,000 members across 130 countries, it is an influential organization.
  • Insights Association. The Insights Association is U.S.-based. It was created in a merger of two longstanding associations: CASRO and MRA. This organization runs many events and has a certification program for market researchers.
  • Advertising Research Foundation (ARF). ARF concentrates on advertising and media research. ARF puts on a well-known trade show/conference each year and has an important awards program for advertising research, known as the Ogilvy’s. The ARF is likely the most essential trade organization to be a part of if you work in an ad agency or the media or focus on advertising research.
  • Market Research Society. MRS is the U.K. analog to the Insights Association. This organization reaches beyond the U.K. and has some great online courses.
  • The American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). AAPOR is an influential trade group regarding public opinion polling and pre-election polling. They win the award for longevity, as they have been around since 1947. I consider AAPOR to be the most “academic” of the trade groups, as in addition to researchers and clients, they have quite a few college professors as members. They publish Public Opinion Quarterly, a key academic journal for polling and survey research. AAPOR is a small organization with a large impact.
  • The Research Society. The Research Society is Australia’s key trade association for market researchers.

Many countries have their own trade associations, and there are some associations specific to particular industries, such as pharmaceuticals and health care.

Below are other types of organizations that are not trade associations but are of interest to survey researchers.

  • The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. The Roper Center is an archive of past polling data, mainly from the U.S. It is currently housed at Cornell University. It can be fascinating to use it to see what American opinion looked like decades ago.
  • The Archive of Market and Social Research (AMSR). AMSR is likely of most interest to U.K. researchers. It is an archive of U.K. history through the lens of polls and market research studies that have been collected.
  • The University of Georgia. The University of Georgia has a leading academic program that trains future market researchers. This university is quite involved in the market research industry and sponsors many exciting seminars. There are some other universities with market research programs, but the University of Georgia is by far the one that is the most tightly connected with the industry.
  • The Burke Institute. The Burke Institute offers many seminars and courses of interest to market research. Many organizations encourage their staff members to take Burke Institute courses.
  • Women in Research (WiRe). WiRe is a group that advances the voice of women in market research. This organization has gained significantly in prominence over the past few years and is doing great work.
  • Green Book. Green Book is a directory of market research firms. Back “in the day,” the Green Book was the printed green directory used by most researchers to find focus group facilities. This organization hosts message boards, conducts industry studies and seminars.
  • Quirk’s. Quirk’s contains interesting articles and runs webinars and conferences.

CRUX POLL SHOWS THAT JUST 17% OF AMERICANS TRUST POLLSTERS

Published October 20, 2021 Election polling , Methodology Leave a Comment
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ROCHESTER, NY – OCTOBER 20, 2021 – Polling results released today by Crux Research indicate that just 17% of U.S. adults have “very high trust” or “high trust” in pollsters/polling organizations.

Just 21% of U.S. adults felt that polling organizations did an “excellent” or “good” job in predicting the 2020 U.S. Presidential election. 40% of adults who were polled in the 2020 election felt the poll they responded to was biased.

Trust in pollsters is higher among Democrats than it is among Republicans and Independents. Pollster trust is highest among adults under 30 years old and lowest among those over 50. This variability can contribute to the challenges pollsters face, as cooperation with polls may also vary among these groups.

It has been a difficult stretch of time for pollsters. 51% of Americans feel that Presidential election polls are getting less accurate over time. And, just 12% are confident that polling organizations will correctly predict the next President in 2024.

The poll results show that there are trusted institutions and professions in America. Nurses are the most trusted profession, followed by medical doctors and pharmacists. Telemarketers, car salespersons, social media companies, Members of Congress, and advertising agencies are the least trusted professions.

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Methodology

This poll was conducted online between October 6 and October 17, 2021. The sample size was 1,198 U.S. adults (aged 18 and over). Quota sampling and weighting were employed to ensure that respondent proportions for age group, sex, race/ethnicity, education, and region matched their actual proportions in the population.   

This poll did not have a sponsor and was conducted and funded by Crux Research, an independent market research firm that is not in any way associated with political parties, candidates, or the media.

All surveys and polls are subject to many sources of error. The term “margin of error” is misleading for online polls, which are not based on a probability sample which is a requirement for margin of error calculations. If this study did use probability sampling, the margin of error would be +/-3%.

About Crux Research Inc.

Crux Research partners with clients to develop winning products and services, build powerful brands, create engaging marketing strategies, enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty, improve products and services, and get the most out of their advertising.

Using quantitative and qualitative methods, Crux connects organizations with their customers in a wide range of industries, including health care, education, consumer goods, financial services, media and advertising, automotive, technology, retail, business-to-business, and non-profits.

Crux connects decision makers with customers, uses data to inspire new thinking, and assures clients they are being served by experienced, senior level researchers who set the standard for customer service from a survey research and polling consultant. To learn more about Crux Research, visit www.cruxresearch.com.

Less useful research questions

Published September 3, 2021 Marketing , Methodology Leave a Comment
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Questionnaire “real estate” is limited and valuable. Most surveys fielded today are too long and this causes problems with respondent fatigue and trust. Researchers tend to start the questionnaire design process with good intent and aim to keep survey experiences short and compelling for respondents. However, it is rare to see a questionnaire get shorter as it undergoes revision and review, and many times the result is impossibly long surveys.

One way to guard against this is to be mindful. All questions included should have a clear purpose and tie back to study objectives. Many times, researchers include some questions and options simply out of habit, and not because these questions will add value to the project.

Below are examples of question types that, more often or not, add little to most questionnaires. These questions are common and used out of habit. There are certainly exceptions when it makes sense to include these questions, but for the most part we advise against using them unless there is a specific reason to include them.

Marital status

Somewhere along the way, asking a respondent’s marital status became standard on most consumer questionnaires. Across thousands of studies, I can only recall a few times when I have actually used it for anything. It is appropriate to ask if it is relevant. Perhaps your client is a jewelry company or in the bridal industry. Or, maybe you are studying relationships. However, I would nominate marital status as being the least used question in survey research history.

Other (specify)

Many multiple response questions ask a respondent to select all that apply from a list, and then as a final option will have “other.” Clients constantly pressure researchers to leave a space for respondents to type out what this “other” option is. We rarely look at what they type in. I tell clients that if we expect a lot of respondents to select the other option, it probably means that we have not done a good job at developing the list. It may also mean that we should be asking the question in an open-ended fashion. Even when it is included, most of the respondents who select other will not type anything into the little box anyway.

Don’t Know Options

We recently composed an entire post about when to include a Don’t Know option on a question. To sum it up, the incoming assumption should be that you will not use a Don’t Know option unless you have an explicit reason to do so. Including Don’t Know as an option can make a data set hard to analyze. However, there are exceptions to this rule, as Don’t Know can be an appropriate choice. That said, it is overused on surveys currently.

Open-Ends

The transition from telephone to online research has completely changed how researchers can ask open-ended questions. In the telephone days, we could pose questions that were very open-ended because we had trained interviewers who could probe for meaningful answers. With online surveys, open-ended questions that are too loose rarely produce useful information. Open-ends need to be specific and targeted. We favor the inclusion of just a handful of open-ends in each survey, and that they are a bit less “open-ended” than what has been traditionally asked.

Grid questions with long lists

We have all seen these. These are long lists of items that require a scaled response, perhaps a 5-point agree/disagree scale. The most common abandon point on a survey is the first time a respondent encounters a grid question with a long list. Ideally, these lists are about 4 to 6 items and there are no more than two or three of them on a questionnaire.

We currently field a study that has a list like this with 28 items in it. There is no way we are getting good information from this question and we are fatiguing the respondent for the remainder of the survey.

Specifying time frames

Survey research often seeks to find out about a behavior across a specified time frame. For instance, we might want to know if a consumer has used a product in the past day, past week, past month, etc. The issue here is not so much the time frame, it is when we consider the responses to be literal. I have seen clients take past day usage and multiply it by 365 and assume that will equate to past year usage. Technically and mathematically, that might be true, but it isn’t how respondents react to questions.

In reality, it is likely accurate to ask if a respondent has done something in the past day. But, once the time frames get longer, we are really asking about “ever” usage. It depends a bit on the purchase cycle of the product and its cost, but for most products, asking if they have used in the past month, 6 months, year, etc. will yield similar responses.

Some researchers work around this by just asking “ever used” and “recently used.” There are times when that works, but we tend to set a reasonable time frame for recent use and go with that, typically within the past week.

Household income

Researchers have asked household income as long as the survey research field has been around. There are at least three serious problems with it. First, many respondents are not knowledgeable about what their household income is. Most households have a “family CFO” who takes the lead on financial issues, and even this person often will not know what the family income is. 

Second, the categories chosen affect the response to the income question, indicating just how unstable it is. Asking household income in say, ten categories versus five categories will not result in comparable data. Respondents tend to assume the middle of the range given is normal, and respond using that as a reference point.

Third, and most importantly, household income is a lousy measure of socio-economic status (SES). Many young people have low annual incomes but a wealthy lifestyle as they are still being supported by their parents. Many older people are retired and may have almost non-existent incomes, yet live a wealthy lifestyle off of their savings. Household income tends to only be a reasonable measure of SES for respondents aged about 30 to 60,

There are better measures of SES. Education level can work, and a particularly good question is to ask the respondent about their mother’s level of education, which has been shown to correlate strongly with SES. We also ask about their attitudes towards their income – whether they have all the money they need, just enough, or if they struggle to meet basic expenses.

Attention spans are getting shorter and as more and more surveys are being completed on mobile devices there are plenty of distractions as respondents answer questionnaires. Engage them, get their attention, and keep the questionnaire short. There may be no such thing as a dumb question, but there are certainly questions that when asked on a survey do not yield useful information.

Should you include a “Don’t Know” option on your survey question?

Published August 2, 2021 Marketing , Methodology Leave a Comment
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Questionnaire writers construct a bridge between client objectives and a line of questioning that a respondent can understand. This is an underappreciated skill.

The best questionnaire writers empathize with respondents and think deeply about tasks respondents are asked to perform. We want to strike a balance between the level of cognitive effort required and a need to efficiently gather large amounts of data. If the cognitive effort required is too low, the data captured is not of high quality. If it is too high, respondents get fatigued and stop attending to our questions.

One of the most common decisions researchers have to make is whether or not to allow for a Don’t Know (DK) option on a question. This is often a difficult choice, and the correct answer on whether to include a DK option might be the worst possible answer: “It depends.”

Researchers have genuine disagreements about the value of a DK option. I lean strongly towards not using DK’s unless there is a clear and considered reason for doing so.

Clients pay us to get answers from respondents and to find out what they know, not what they don’t know. Pragmatically, whenever you are considering adding a DK option your first inclination should be that you perhaps have not designed the question well. If a large proportion of your respondent base will potentially choose “don’t know,” odds are high that you are not asking a good question to begin with, but there are exceptions.

If you get in a situation where you are not sure if you should include a DK option, the right thing to do is to think broadly and reconsider your goal: why are you asking the question in the first place? Here is an example which shows how the DK decision can actually be more complicated than it first appears.

We recently had a client that wanted us to ask a question similar to this: “Think about the last soft drink you consumed. Did this soft drink have any artificial ingredients?”

Our quandary was whether we should just ask this as a Yes/No question or to also give the respondent a DK option. There was some discussion back and forth, as we initially favored not including DK, but our client wanted it.

Then it dawned on us that whether or not to include DK depended on what the client wanted to get out of the question. On one hand, the client might want to truly understand if the last soft drink consumed had any artificial ingredients in it, which is ostensibly what the question asks. If this was the goal, we felt it was necessary to better educate the respondent on what an “artificial ingredient” was so they could provide an informed answer and so all respondents would be working from a common definition. Or, alternatively, we could ask for the exact brand and type of soft drink they consumed and then on the back-end code which ones have artificial ingredients and which do not, and thus get a good estimate for the client.

The other option was to realize that respondents might have their own definitions of “artificial ingredients” that may or may not match our client’s definition. Or, they may have no clue what is artificial and what is not.

In the end, we decided to use the DK option in this case because understanding how many people are ignorant to artificial ingredients fit well with our objectives. When we pressed the client, we learned that they wanted to document this ambiguity. If a third of consumers don’t know whether or not their soft drinks have artificial ingredients in them, this would be useful information for our client to know.

This is a good example on how a seemingly simple question can have a lot of thinking behind it and how it is important to contextualize this reasoning when reporting results. In this case, we are not really measuring whether people are drinking soft drinks with artificial ingredients. We are measuring what they think they are doing, which is not the same thing and likely more relevant from a marketing point-of-view.

There are other times when a DK option makes sense to include. For instance, some researchers will conflate the lack of an option (a DK response) with a neutral opinion and these are not the same thing. For example, we could be asking “how would you rate the job Joe Biden is doing as President?” Someone who answers in the middle of the response scale likely has a considered, neutral opinion of Joe Biden. Someone answering DK has not considered the issue and should not be assumed to have a neutral opinion of the president. This is another case where it might make sense to use DK.

However, there are probably more times when including a DK option is a result of lazy questionnaire design than any deep thought regarding objectives. In practice, I have found that it tends to be clients who are inexperienced in market research that press hardest to include DK options.

There are at least a couple of serious problems with including DK options on questionnaires. The first is “satisficing” – which is a tendency respondents have to not place a lot of effort on responding and instead choose the option that requires the least cognitive effort. The DK option encourages satisficing. A DK option also allows respondents to disengage with the survey and can lead to inattention on subsequent items.

DK responses create difficulties when analyzing data. We like to look at questions on a common base of respondents, and that becomes hard to comprehend when respondents choose DK on some questions but not others. Including DK makes it harder to compare results across questions. DK options also limit the ability to use multivariate statistics, as a DK response does not fit neatly on a scale.

Critics would say that researchers should not force respondents to express and opinion they do not have and therefore should provide DK options. I would counter by saying that if you expect a substantial amount of people to not have an opinion, odds are high you should reframe the question and ask them about something they do know about. It is usually (but not always) the case that we want to find out more about what people know than what they don’t know.

“Don’t know” can be a plausible response. But, more often than not, even when it is a plausible response if we feel a lot of people will choose it, we should reconsider why we are asking the question. Yes, we don’t want to force people to express an option they don’t have. But rather than include DK, it is better to rewrite a question to be more inclusive of everybody.

As an extreme example, here is a scenario that shows how a DK can be designed out of a question:

We might start with a question the client provides us: “How many minutes does your child spend doing homework on a typical night?” For this question, it wouldn’t take much pretesting to realize that many parents don’t really know the answer to this, so our initial reaction might be to include a DK option. If we don’t, parents may give an uninformed answer.

However, upon further thought, we should realize that we may not really care about how many minutes the child spends on homework and we don’t really need to know whether the parent knows this precisely or not. Thinking even deeper, some kids are much more efficient in their homework time than others, so measuring quantity isn’t really what we want at all. What we really want to know is, is the child’s homework level appropriate and effective from the parent’s perspective?

This probing may lead us down a road to consider better questions, such as “in your opinion, does your child have too much, too little, or about the right amount of homework?” or “does the time your child spends on homework help enhance his/her understanding of the material?” This is another case when thinking more about why we are asking the question tends to result in better questions being posed.

This sort of scenario happens a lot when we start out thinking we want to ask about a behavior, when what we really want to do is ask about an attitude.

The academic research on this topic is fairly inconclusive and sometimes contradictory. I think that is because academic researchers don’t consider the most basic question, which is whether or not including DK will better serve the client’s needs. There are times that understanding that respondents don’t know is useful. But, in my experience, more often than not if a lot of respondents choose DK it means that the question wasn’t designed well. 

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