What a Yankee Legend Can Teach Us About Research - 5th & 6th Innings
5th Inning – Who are the folks that you most want to learn about? Who’s the audience? How large is that audience?
If you have a product or service that is used by a particular group of people (e.g., Moms, beer drinkers, homeowners, etc.), you want to get an idea of how your target audience might perceive or use that product or service. You probably will also want to understand how your product or service meets consumers’ unmet needs.
Now, your clients will probably already have a good idea of who their target audience is. This knowledge is crucial for the researcher especially when it comes to determining the cost of the research study. The reason is that one of the most significant factors when it comes to evaluating the cost of a proposed research study is audience size. For research purposes, audience size is usually described by defining what is called the incidence rate:
DEFINITION:
Incidence rate – the prevalence of a specific audience in the overall population
So, for example, there are 62.1 million Hispanics in the United States (footnote source: 2020 US Census), which accounts for 18.7% of the US population. Therefore, the incidence rate for Hispanics in the US is 18.7%.
Why is this important? For the very simple reason that the harder it is to find people who are part of your target audience, the higher the cost. If your client’s target audience is fairly narrow, it may be worth encouraging your client to include a secondary audience to “widen the net” to be cast. Doing so will make it easier to get a sufficient sample and keep recruitment costs manageable.
6th Inning – Who (what groups, departments, clients) will be using the research and how will it be used?
The goal of this question is to determine your primary and secondary stakeholders in an attempt to curb what I’ll call “research drift”.
DEFINITION:
Research drift – when stakeholders try to incorporate and thereby answer too many questions with a research study. Doing so will lead to inefficient, lengthy, and overly expensive research
Research drift can lead to questionnaires that can be unnecessarily lengthy. This will make it more difficult to acquire a sufficient sample promptly. Moreover, this can muddy the waters and hide the true objectives of the research.
This can be a significant issue with questionnaire development. According to research firm Kantar:
“How long should a survey be? It’s best to keep surveys under 12 minutes – though 10 minutes is even better. Often, the longer the survey, the higher the dropout rate.[underlining mine] Kantar has found that a survey that takes over 25 minutes loses more than three times as many respondents as one that is under five minutes.”[1]
Now it’s often necessary to get feedback and buy-in from a variety of different groups (e.g., Marketing, Sales, Product Development, etc.), but at some point, the researcher will have to put his foot down and tell a group that additional questions (in say, a qualitative research guide or quantitative survey) simply cannot be included. In such situations, it’s in the researcher’s best interest to make this well known at a project’s outset to get buy-in from clients.
Once the primary and secondary stakeholders have been established, the researcher will then have a better idea as to what learnings should be prioritized and also how any analyses should be written.
[1] “What is a good survey length for online research?”, kantar.com, January 2022