Research Methodologies « Previous Entries

The Hatemail Bag

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

When I go out to do research for clients, sometimes I have to send bulk mailers to a large number of people. Earlier this week, I had to send invitations for comments on a new post-secondary education program to several thousand people. Here are some of the better responses I got and how I responded [...]

Behaviour Modelling: Did it Go Out With A Whimper?

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

An interesting article in Wired this month talks about how humanity is entering into the “Petabyte Age”. They describe the Petabyte Age as a time where there are sensors everywhere, data pouring in from myriad sources, unlimited data storage capacity and the processing power necessary to fill in the gaps. This article goes on to [...]

Three Ways to Leverage Subcontractors

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

In the past, I’ve discussed the relative merits and challenges of growing your consulting business beyond a sole proprietorship. Since February, my business has grown in leaps and bounds, as I was confident it would and I’ve had to hire help. In my case, I’ve employed the services of two very different kinds of sub-contractors [...]

Four Ways A Research Coach Can Help Your Business

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

I’ve recently started a new avenue of my consulting practice - research coaching. I can’t take credit for the idea because to be honest, my client coined the idea. At a meeting where I was proposing a normal research project, it became clear that the available funds for the project had shrunk by as much [...]

ProTip: An Ounce Of Research Prevention

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

I am currently in a situation where I have to go back and re-survey a population almost a full year after the last time I contacted them. It’s difficult enough to nail down a decent sized population for an initial study but its even more difficult to go back and look at a similar population [...]

Four Reasons Why I F*cking Love Jigsaw

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

I have recently started using a new research tool - Jigsaw. Jigsaw is essentially a DIY contact list builders. Before Jigsaw, if you wanted to pull together a list of say… Business Analysts in North America, you would either have to try and dig up those contacts using a clever combination of Google and LinkedIn [...]

What Statistics Can Tell You and What They Can’t

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008

I mentioned in a posting last week that I recently wrote a test for a job with the RCMP as a Criminal Intelligence Analyst. Part of the test was an essay question that asked something along the lines of “statistics are all well and good but why is it a good idea to go out [...]

Some Tips From the Trenches

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008

I had the pleasure of having dinner with Steve Thomson from Thomson and Associates last night. In addition to being a great guy, Steve has a consulting practice that is very similar to mine and overlaps in some areas in terms of the clients we work with.
Steve and I spent our time swapping war stories [...]

Protip: research accountability

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008

There are lots of reasons why you might want to do qualitative or quantitative research and just as many reasons why you need to be accountable for your work. This posting covers some of these reasons and how you can cover your ass in case a client wants to know what you’ve been doing.
1. Due [...]

Moving Towards a More Personal Research Methodology

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

I had a fascinating chat with Mark Cameron from Techneos on Monday afternoon where he enlightened me to the fact that here in North America, we do very little face to face surveying (~2%) and in the UK (and probably the rest of the EU), they do almost a third of their research face to [...]

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