No more surveys in 16 years?
Back in March 2010, I caused quite a stir with a prediction, at the UK’s MRS Conference, when I said that in 20 years we would not be conducting market research surveys. I followed my conference contribution with a more nuanced description of my prediction on my blog. At the time the fuss was mostly from people rejecting my prediction. More recently there have been people saying the MR industry is too fixated on surveys, and my predictions are thought by some to be too cautious. So, here is my updated view on why I think we won’t be conducting ‘surveys’ in 2034. What did I say in 2010? The first thing I did was clarify what I meant by market research surveys: I was talking about questionnaires that lasted ten minutes or more. I excluded large parts of social research; some parts of which I think will continue to use questionnaires. Why no more surveys? In essence there are three key reasons that I think surveys will disappear The decline in response rates means that most survey research is being conducted with an ever smaller proportion of the population, who are taking very large numbers of surveys (in many […]