Market Research Interview Tips: Data Collection Methods

January 25, 2012

Market Research Data Collection Cartoon

Over the last two weeks, I have written a series of blog posts regarding how to design an effective market research interviewing script and how to choose the right question style for your market research interview questions.  This week, I will be covering how to plan out the data collection process of a market research interview project.

This is a very important phase of the research that must be planned out prior to beginning the first market research interview, as poorly organized data collection will almost always result in corrupted, incomplete and/or lost data.  This is the last thing you want to deal with because reaching the target sample size in a market research interview project is always difficult and these data issues often result in data that needs to be discarded.

So what are the data collection methods available to researchers?

  1. Audio Recording or Audio Transcription
  2. Hand-written or typed answers within a printed or Word version of the interview script
  3. Spreadsheet Program-based script with fields for data (i.e. Excel)
  4. A Survey Tool (i.e. SurveyBuilder (free), Vovici, Qualtrics, etc.)

The ultimate goal of the data collection process is to get the data into a format that allows questions to be easily tabulated and analyzed. Thus, collecting data outside of a spreadsheet program or survey tool will require a 2-step process to get the data ready for analysis.  Introducing this additional step will increase the potential of data errors and increase the time it takes to collect and prepare the data.  For this reason, it is ill advised to use either of these data collection methods exclusively for your market research interview project.

At a minimum, you will want to collect the interview data in a spreadsheet program like Excel.  However, aggregating respondent information that is collected in an Excel spreadsheet can be very difficult and time consuming, as it often requires standardizing data responses and dealing with missing information.  Thus, it is recommended that you invest the time to input the interview script into a survey software (i.e. SurveyBuilder, Vovici, Qualtrics, etc.) before you start the interviewing process if you plan on interviewing 4 or more people or are using a complex interviewing script with skip patterns.

The reason for this threshold is that entering an interview script into a survey tool can be time consuming and may not be worth it for a simple interview with a small number of respondents and questions.  However, using Excel as the data collection tool increases the likelihood of errors and skipped questions, as Excel does not provide an easy way to validate that every question has been answered or that the responses were entered in the correct fields.

Utilizing an online survey tool lessens the burden on the interviewers, as it:

  1. Seamlessly executes skip patterns
  2. Ensures that all questions are answered
  3. Allows you to have multiple people conduct the interviews and assimilate the data in the same location.

These are hard benefits to pass up especially when you consider that SurveyBuilder is free.

Additionally, it is a good idea to use audio recording or audio transcription as a secondary source to capture data provided by the interviewee that was not within the scope of the exact questions, as this information can sometimes be very useful.  However, you must ask the respondents for the right to record their responses before doing so.

Later this week, I will be writing a post on how to effectively plan out your strategy for recruiting your target interviewees for your market research project.

Disclaimer: The creator of SurveyBuilder, uSamp, is an OpenView portfolio company.

Marketing Manager, Pricing Strategy

<strong>Brandon Hickie</strong> is Marketing Manager, Pricing Strategy at <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/">LinkedIn</a>. He previously worked at OpenView as Marketing Insights Manager. Prior to OpenView Brandon was an Associate in the competition practice at Charles River Associates where he focused on merger strategy, merger regulatory review, and antitrust litigation.