Editor’s note: "War Stories" is a regular feature in which Art Shulman, president of Shulman Research, Van Nuys, Calif., presents humorous stories of life in the research trenches.
Dave Chill of the Disney Channel tells about a study where he sent a questionnaire draft to a supplier to finalize. The study involved a telephone survey in Tulsa, Okla. When the supplier Submitted the final version, one alternative on the ethnicity question had been changed; the supplier had replaced "Native American" with "American Indian."
When Chill asked the supplier about the change, the supplier told him that he’d recently conducted a survey in Oklahoma where he’d used "Native American" and over 80 percent of respondents had claimed to be Native Americans, with explanations like, "My granddaddy was born here, my daddy was born here, and sure as shootin’, I’m a native American too."
Reminds me of a survey we conducted with engineering students. One of our study locations was on the campus of a predominantly black university in Florida. On the ethnicity question we used the alternative "African-American."
The only problem was that many of the students on the Florida campus were from the Caribbean, and did not consider themselves African-American. Not only were they not American, but they didn’t consider themselves African either. We had a lot of "Other" responses written in on that question.
Chuck Teaman of Strategic Alternatives Of Florida tells about being a neophyte researcher who had occasion to accompany an interviewer door-to-door in sub-zero Midwestern weather on a home placement callback interview.
When the interviewer came to the overall rating question (a 5-point asymmetrical scale) and read the scale choices, the respondent answered, "I liked it fine," The interviewer said, "Oh, you mean excellent," promptly circled "Excellent" and went on to the next question.
Teaman didn’t want to interrupt so he spoke to the interviewer afterward, who assured him that, "Well, everybody knows ’fine’ means ’excellent’ in Peoria, Ill.!"
Recently I was sittingin the monitoring room of a telephone interviewing service that was conducting my survey on reasons for calling my client’s airline to make travel reservations. The service was also conducting several other surveys which were not mine. The interviewing service was very specific in notifying me that I was not to leave the monitoring room without notifying them. Security was very important to them, they assured me.
As one of "my" interviews was completed, the monitor pressed some buttons so I could listen in on another. The interviewer was at the tail end of asking one of the questions in my survey. "Please use a 1 to 10 scale, where 10 means ’Extremely important’ and a 1 means ’Not at all important.’" She then proceeded to read the first item, "Being able to dream and think big."
Suddenly I thought, "This doesn’t seem like a reason for selecting an airline. In fact, I don’t recall adding this item to my battery of items. In fact, I’m sure it isn’t on my survey."
I was right. The monitor had accidentally pressed a wrong button and tuned into another survey the service was conducting, probably on a lottery.
Donna Tinari-Siegfried of Fundamental Research Group was conducting a focus group, and one of the respondents, with an enormous black bag slung over her shoulders, introduced herself as a surgeon. As Tinafi-Siegffied was getting into the main topic of the session, the surgeon was paged. She needed to use a telephone immediately, and left the room to make her call.
Suddenly, Tinari-Siegffied’s eye was caught by movement on the floor. She glanced over and there, looking up at her, was a little dog! All the respondents took a look in the same direction and one of them yelled "There’s a dog in the room!" Tinafi-Siegfried could hear the back room break out into hysterics.
Just then, the surgeon came through the door, having completed her call, scooped the dog up and put it back into the enormous black bag.