(I meant to do this last week, but I was visiting family in Asia, and damn it, Firefox ate my post again. Sorry about that. - DD)

We left off talking about how important it is to know your client:

When you are doing research for someone, they are entrusting you to discover what they need to accomplish their goals. It's an incredible responsibility, and not one that you should take lightly.  In order to understand their needs, you have to understand them.  You have to understand their organizational mission, their history, their resources in addition to the parameters of your specific project.  Unless you know your client, all the time and resources you put into it will be for naught.

The goal was to leave off and use the absence to see what we could find.  We'll see what we found out under the flip.

Disclaimer: I don't know why we Americans make New Year's Resolutions. When I asked my personal guru, all I got was this lame article. So, if anyone can tell me where, when, and why this tradition was started I would really appreciate it.

There's more.

Hi, everyone.

Dirty D has emailed to let me know that due to family related travel, he is going to be thirty-six to forty-eight hours delayed in posting his update to his ongoing series, Building a Poll. He is currently in East Asia, where he is removed from us by several, several time zones.

Ah, the life of a blogger.

Admin

In the last installment of this series, I talked a bit about how I wanted to change this up.  Instead of pretending that we were going to be working on some imaginary Congressional race in Missouri, which was just impossible to simulate, we were going to simulate doing a project for The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.   Since their donor base and primary sources of revenue come from senior citizens and baby boomers, they want to know what these people think of recent inductions into the Hall of Fame, what they think of recent exhibits and what directions that they think that Hall should explore.

There's more.

Right at the top of this post, I'd like to take a step back and thank you, our readers, for continuing to stay with us as we evolve and come up with new ideas.  What began with Blue Leader and me ranting about our experiences working in data and analytics is slowly growing into a strong, six person team of people with diverse points of view, ideas and approaches to solving problems. And as we move forward and develop our ideas, we look back at other things that we tried and realize that we may have to tinker with the ideas a bit.

This is one of those moments.

Since we talked about something so mechanical and technical for the last two columns, today, we're going to talk about something that doesn't involve SPSS nor does it involve any kind of programming.  Today, we're going to talk about why every poll that isn't a push poll uses such milquetoast, mild language when they ask questions.

There's more.

Hi, everyone.  Last time, we discussed the mechanics of random sampling in SPSS. To summarize, we discussed how you randomize a list and then how you pick out some 500 records from the list at random. Today, we're going to talk a little bit more about what we did and why we did it that way.

There's more...

It's been a while since we've had an update in the Building a Poll series, and I'm excited to pick it up again. When we last left off, we were talking about using a list strategically. I'd like to continue on the subject of using lists, but we're going talk about something more mechanical aspect of using the list: building a random sample.

Granted, if you're a pollster, you're likely to have purchased a random sample from your data vendor, but it never hurts you to understand the mechanics of how this works.  Heck, maybe one of your clients stuck you with a membership list or some other targeted list and asked you to call a random sample of that list.  You can't very well send that list off to your data vendor and ask them to sample it for you!

There's more...

These last few installments in these series have focused heavily on how a pollster makes use of the lists given to her, and it's for a pretty good reason.  That reason is not, by the way, to promote Blue Leader's series on Building a Voter File.  The reason is that polling would really, really, suck if there were no lists. This is why our tag line reads "Analytics, data, modeling..." these three fields are so closely interrelated that I'm tempted to call them areas of specialty in one large area, and not three distinct undertakings.  Without list vendors out there, we pollsters would be severely limited in what we could do.

This brings us to what I'd like to talk about today, which is how you pick a data vendor. 

There's more...

Admin Note: We apologize for the tardiness of this post. Dirty D got swamped in his day job and forgot to send me his contribution for editing and posting.  We'll try to be on time in the future.

In my last post, we began a conversation about using your list strategically.  This was the beginning of the intersection with Blue Leader's awesome series, Building a Voter File. I'd like to continue that conversation today.  When we left off, we were talking about using variables on a list in lieu of questions in a poll, and how you could trust what's on there.  I'd like to continue that conversation a bit today.

There's more...