How Acting has Made me a Better Researcher

I’m a market researcher and an actor, and studying theatre makes me a better researcher. Here's why. 

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Three Tips for Researching Hard to Reach Audiences

A lot of our work involves recruiting respondents from research panels. Sometimes, though, we need to find people who aren’t on panels and may be suspicious of research. 

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Five Things We Did to Pull off In-Person Research in the Middle of a Pandemic

We just finished fieldwork on a user experience project that would have been challenging in normal times, but was made doubly so since we’re in the middle of a global pandemic.

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Moderating Tips Learned at the Bar

I’m always looking for parallels between my research life and my non-research life. Just as playing the ukulele made me a better report writer and ordering decaf coffee influenced my questionnaire

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Research Wisdom from Maya Angelou

Like many people, I was saddened by the passing of author Maya Angelou last week. After her death, I learned that she had once been a market research interviewer. In A

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Some Tips For Doing Event Surveys

I’m on my way back from Portland, where I spent two days at a fantastic conference of independent workers: freelancers, entrepreneurs, and other intrepid souls like myself. Like most conferences, there were

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I’ve written before about my mobile life, where I spend a few months in a place before moving on.  I’m lucky to have the technology to be able to service my

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I love this scene from Annie Hall, where Annie and Alvin are telling their respective therapists how often they have sex. Alvin: Hardly ever. Maybe three times a week. Annie: Constantly. I’d say three

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So far this year, I’ve worked from half a dozen US cities, as well as Mexico, Thailand, China, and, currently, the Dominican Republic.  As a location-independent researcher, I’m delighted by

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A friend just pointed me to this article on a Washington Post survey of local issues in my hometown of Washington, D.C.  Seems there’s a little hullaballoo about the framing of the survey results—namely,

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Test the Water Before you Jump: The Importance of Pre-testing

I’m always surprised (and frankly, a little alarmed) when clients don’t want to pre-test a questionnaire. This strikes me as a little bit like launching an ad campaign without testing the content.

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Storytelling with Data

“There is always a story in the data—you just have to find it.” This simple advice from an old boss got me through last week, when I got a desperate

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