Market Research 101

Right..I've been in this industry for as long as I started working...over 15 years to be exact.


When we design questionnaires for our clients, as a Neutral party, our job is to understand the client's objectives and find ways to gather consumers' feedback in the most neutral and un-bias way.

One of the many learnings or rules we had while designing questions, particularly to check customers feedback or satisfaction, is that we should never mix positive and negative statements in a list.

A perfect example below, the scale goes from Disagree to Agree.  I personally find the questions very confusing, both as a respondent / consumer and as a market research specialist.  Note, how the positive and negative statements were used inter-changeably.

One has to be really alert to be able to answer accurately, don't you think?


Makes me wonder..if this is a new methodology that I've not been exposed to. Or am I too out-dated?

If I am to re-design this using what I've been taught, the list should go something like this:

Stories from xxx in my xxx...

...are not disruptive
..are interesting to me
..are not misleading
..are relevant to me


This way..respondents whom most of the time are layman consumers do not have to keep switching their mindset from positive to negative state and it's so much easier to apply the Disagree - Agree scale in the same flow.

What do you think?  Agree?