by F. Annie Pettit (Author)
The 4th edition is newly revised in 2023 and includes a forward by Pravin Shekar, The Outlier Marketer and Former Interim CEO of ESOMAR!
This book will help marketers, brand managers, and advertising executives who may have less experience in the research industry create great questionnaires and collect high quality data. It will also help academic and experienced researchers in a range of social science disciplines write questionnaires that are better suited for the general population, particularly when using research panels and customer lists. Many questionnaire books treat the people who answer questionnaires as robots rather than as fallible, imperfect people. This can lead to poor response rates, poor completion rates, poor data quality, and results that didn't always generalize to the desired target audience. A unique approach to questionnaire design: Written by a market researcher with more than twenty years of practical questionnaire design experience, People Aren't Robots takes a human and empathetic approach to the design of questions. This results in survey questions that help people answer more honestly and get you better, more actionable data. It's written from a respectful point of view that puts people first and researchers second. Generate trustworthy answers to your key consumer and customer questions: How satisfied are my customers? What do my shoppers want and need? What characteristics does my target audience have? What drives them to shop? What improvements do my customers want? Where do my customers shop? Why are my shoppers choosing competitors? What are the values and beliefs of my shoppers? What are the current market trends? What markets should I expand into? What innovations should I develop? Questionnaire design topics include:- The mindset required to create survey questions people actually want to answer
- Basic principles and guidelines for designing survey questions
- Best practices for choosing respectful and inclusive words and language
- Steps for creating screener questions that identify the correct target audience
- Processes for writing data quality questions that identify people prepared to participate today
- Avoiding common question design problems
- Designing various types of quantitative and qualitative questions, e.g., single-selects, multi-selects, grids, scales, ranks, ratings, open-ends, verbatims
- Designing sensitive questions related to income, ethnicity, and disabilities
- Designing demographic questions like age, region, and employment
Author Biography
Annie Pettit, PhD, is a Fellow of the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association, the Canadian body for market research. She received a PhD in experimental psychology after completing her dissertation on the data quality of offline and online surveys. Dr. Pettit has more than fifteen years of experience writing, analyzing, advising, and teaching questionnaire design in the professional world of marketing research. She writes for professional journals and industry associations, and has been an invited speaker at many industry conferences. Dr. Pettit has won a 2016 Ginny Valentine Award, 2014 ESOMAR Excellence Award for Best Paper, 2014 MRIA Award of Outstanding Merit, 2013 ESOMAR award for Best Methodological Paper, and the 2011 David K. Hardin Award. Her first book published in 2011, The Listen Lady, is a novel about social media research.