There’s no question that marketers are more focused than ever on the ROI of marketing research.  All too often, however, it seems that efforts to improve ROI aim to get more research per dollar spent rather than better research. 

Better survey design is one sure way to improve the ROI of marketing research.  However, despite advances in our understanding of the cognitive processes involved in answering surveys, market researchers continue to write poor survey questions that may introduce considerable measurement error. 

I think this is due in part to the fact that the processes involved in asking a question are fundamentally different from the processes involved in answering that same question.  Recent contributions to our understanding of the answering process have been integrated into a theory of survey response by Roger Tourangeau, Lance J. Rips, and Kenneth Rasinski (The Psychology of Survey Response, Cambridge University Press, 2000).  According to Tourangeau, et. al., answering a survey question involves four related processes:  comprehending the question; retrieving relevant information from memory, evaluating the retrieved information, and matching the internally generated answer to the available responses in the survey question.

“Think aloud” pretesting, sometimes known as “cognitive” pretesting or “concurrent protocol analysis” is an important tool for improving the quality of survey questions, and  well-designed think aloud pretests often have, been in my experience, the difference between research that impacts a firm’s business results and research that ends up on the shelf for lack of confidence in the findings.

Warning–what follows is blatant self-promotion of a sort.  ESOMAR is offering my workshop, “Think like a respondent:  A cognitive approach to designing and testing online questionnaires” as part of Congress 2011.  The workshop is scheduled for Sunday, September 18, 2011. This year’s Congress will be held in Amsterdam.  I’ve offered the workshop once before, at the ESOMAR Online Conference in Berlin last October.

Hope to see you in Amsterdam.