Special report on Europe's baby boomers
A special report in the monthly newsletter Market: Europe examines European baby boomers. The report, "The Post-Wall Consumer: Europe's Baby Boom Generation," looks at the demographic, social, and economic make-up of boomers in many nations. Its author is Cheryl Russell, former editor of American Demographics and current contributing writer for Money magazine.
New teenage telephone omnibus
ICR Survey Research Group, Media, PA, announces a new telephone omnibus called TeenEXCEL as a companion to its EXCEL adult omnibus. TeenEXCEL will consist of 500 interviews per month among a nationally representative sample of teenagers from 12-17 years of age. Interviewing will be structured so that the sample is divided evenly among 12-14 and 15-17 year olds and males and females. A sample balancing program will be utilized to ensure that, when tabulated, the sample reflects the national teenage population.
New program for opinion research with PCs
Computers for Marketing Corporation introduces Surveyor, a PC toolkit for opinion research that lets users compose questionnaires, collect and enter data, and issue reports and analyses. Surveyor runs on fully compatible IBM-PCs with 286 chip, 640K memory, 20 MB hard disk, high density floppy drive and DOS 3.3 or higher.
Kids Study examines 6-14 year olds
A study of the media habits, product purchase preferences and product purchase influence of kids 6-14 is available from Simmons Market Research Bureau. The Kids Study uses personal interviews with kids ages 6-14 and a self-administered questionnaire for the parents to gather information on product and service categories such as breakfast foods, beverages, electronics and entertainment.
Firm offers statistical support
Meyers Research Center now offers a new service called Analytic Integration which is designed to provide clients with statistical and analytical support and service. The focus of the service is data connectivity, an analytical discipline which combines data gathered using different research methodologies, such as consumer and sales data and in-house share data.
Product & Service Update- In-Depth
System captures responses to open-ended questions in CATI
Editor's note: Barry Feinberg is vice president, research director, for Burson-Marsteller, New York.
Audits & Surveys Voice/CATI is a system that records a respondent's spoken answers to open-ended questions and stores them as a digital file along with other questionnaire responses. Because of this capability, we in the research industry can begin to solve problems that are sometimes associated with capturing and analyzing open-ended responses, especially on computer assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) systems.
The system described here is one I helped develop and used as a research company executive at Audits & Surveys and one that I am now using as a research company client at Burson-Marsteller. Since 1987, studies using A&S VOICE/ CATI have been conducted among con-sumers, business executives, and profes-sionals.
Research needs
The primary interest in developing the system was to overcome some of the limitations inherent in capturing responses to open-end questions - especially on CATI systems and especially for studies and questionnaire items which would elicit long open-end replies. In CATI systems, responses that call for a choice among stated alternatives are easily keyed into the computer by the interviewer. Open-ended questions, however, ideally require the interviewer to type or write verbatim the respondent's reply. Since it may be physically impossible for the interviewer to capture the respondent's entire answer in this fashion, interviewers are sometimes instructed to record "key words or phrases" when it is not possible to capture the entire verbatim.
Also, many times, interviewers will ask the respondent to slow down in an attempt to capture all the information. This can break the spontaneity of the response, dampen the respondent's involvement, or even make the respondent lose his or her train of thought. Given enough interruption on the part of the interviewer, the respondent may intentionally or unintentionally truncate his or her response.