Todd Hollander Market Research

When planning a quantitative market research study, one of the first decisions that must be made is which method of data collection to use: online, telephone, in-person, postal mail, email, or other. Until the mid 1990’s, telephone interviewing was the norm for market researchers. Today, online surveys have become the preferred method for most research projects.

Using the Internet as a medium for data collection began around 1995. In its infancy, online surveying was considered inferior to offline methods such as telephone interviewing because of concerns about:

• Representativeness. Only a portion of the population had access to the internet.
• Reaching the respondent . There were no directories or complete lists of Internet users from which samples could be drawn.
• Unsupervised respondents. There was no way to verify who was really at the other end of the connection or how seriously the respondent took the survey.
• Technical limitations of the medium. Slow connections, conflicting security settings, lack of plug-ins for advanced features, differing hardware and software configurations, and bottlenecks caused by too many people trying to access a survey at the same time.
• Loss of direct contact. Interviewers could no longer use and benefit from direct verbal communication with the respondent.
• Privacy concerns. Some respondents were skeptical about the confidentiality of their responses or how the information would be used.
• “Professional” respondents. The integrity of the results could be compromised by respondents who were motivated primarily by incentives.

In the last decade, online research has evolved and expanded to solve each of these problems. As a result, online surveys have replaced telephone interviewing as the “gold standard” of market research because they offer:

• Lower cost
• Faster turnaround
• More convenience and less intrusion for respondents
• Ability to gain insight from hard-to-reach people and geographically dispersed populations
• A more flexible medium, including the increasingly wide range of stimuli that can be used
• More thorough responses
• More truthful/revealing responses

The bottom line: Online surveys offer a number of advantages over telephone interviews and other offline methods. Although no single data collection method is best for all situations, online surveys have become the “gold standard” of marketing research.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 1:07 pm and is filed under Internet vs. Telephone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.