10 rules for express assessment of the quality of the results of sociological or marketing research

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Author: Zalesky Petr Karlovich, candidate of sociological sciences, senior consultant of GfK-Rus, associate professor of the sociology department of the Financial University, member of ESOMAR, member of the Guild of Marketers.





Since school years, we have known the six most frequent questions of young inquisitives and adults who have not lost their healthy curiosity. These questions help everyone navigate the world of events and phenomena:

Who?
What?
Where?
How?
When?
Why?
Now, in the information flow, when new technologies penetrate all aspects of our argentina phone number data everyday life, conducting a survey on the Internet has become easier than ever. Sometimes there is nowhere to hide from the abundance of numbers and links to surveys on any occasion. How to understand where there is serious work behind a publication, based on strict scientific principles, and where there is just an imitation, a hastily tailored replica of a famous brand?



So, here are 10 rules for figuring out whether you should trust the published results of a study. It is important to remember that, firstly, sociology is the most precise of the inexact sciences. And secondly, not every study is a survey, and not every survey is a study.



Rule 1. Who? You need to check the source of the data. How serious and authoritative in the professional environment is the organization/company/author that provided the data for publication. Leading Russian research companies and institutes are often criticized for some political bias. However, they implement in their work proven and reliable survey methods and procedures over the years. This also applies to regional surveys.



Rule 2. What? Find out whether it was a mass survey or the results of focus group discussions/in-depth interviews. Although the division between quantitative and qualitative methods is gradually being erased, since most often they go together and complement each other, it is necessary to understand the basic methodology. Typically, quantitative research answers the questions " how much? and where?", and the results are presented in the form of percentage distributions. Qualitative research, first of all, is focused on obtaining answers to the question "why?", unless this is a probe before a large and labor-intensive mass survey in order to identify hypotheses for setting research problems. Attempts to project the results of conversations with specially selected respondents in focus groups onto wide groups of the population or consumers, and even in the form of percentage distributions, are most often speculative.



Rule 3. Where? This rule implies finding out the geography of the conducted research. Our country is large and very different not only in time zones, climate, but also in socio-economic, infrastructural, national and socio-cultural features. When a survey is conducted in several large cities, it is not at all a fact that similar results will be in the rest and much larger part of our country. Even in Moscow and other cities with a population of over a million, the results vary greatly from district to district. And this is especially noticeable with the spread of the so-called elite housing, business districts, the allocation of mainly industrial and residential areas. A survey using the same questionnaire of residents in Patriki, Krylatskoye, Vykhino or Pechatniki will give completely different results. And the main thing here is to find out whether the appropriate proportions were observed in the sample. It would seem that the Internet unites everyone, but its penetration in different regions, in different social groups, even among people of the same age, the frequency and volume of Internet use are very different. And therefore the following rule for qualifying surveys. Surveys in a store, at a factory checkpoint, near a business center, and at a vegetable market also differ in the composition of respondents, which means that such results should be projected onto specific audiences, but not onto all Russians.