News

This year, Ton Paans, Director of Sample Answers is heading up Stand number: 259-10 at Research & Results Show in Munich, along with Arti Shah, Client Services Manager.

Ton set up the Amsterdam Office of Sample Answers in 2002 and looks after its non-UK European business from the company’s Amsterdam office. “I’m looking forward to this opportunity to talking face to face with people from our industry about our comprehensive one-stop-shop for all sampling needs worldwide. Today we are headquartered in the UK, with satellite offices in The Netherlands and the USA, so we should see a great many of our contacts at the show”.

Sample Answers have been supplying sample and associated services to the Global Market Research Industry for over 20 years and are proud to take a prominent stand at this year’s premiere industry event – Research & Results.

“Our aim is to provide a comprehensive Global sampling service for both consumer and business market research projects, offering consumer lifestyle and B2B data from a wide range of sources and our own world-wide RDD samples, including mobile” commented Sales Director Neil Whelpton.

Want to find out more? Get in touch. You can reach Ton and Arti directly on:

ton.paans@sampleanswers.com

M: +31 (0) 6 4833 2226

arti@sampleanswers.com

M: +44 (0) 77363 00009

T: +44 (0) 20 8274 5000

Stand number: 259-10 at Research & Results Show

Gameweek 1 starts 12 August, so hurry up and select your squad

Spend that £100 million you keep in your back pocket!

Visit: 

Fantasy.premierleague.com

• Create your account
• Choose your squad (£100 million on 15 players)
• Choose your team name
• Join our league: Code to join this league: 1601939-384018

What could be easier?

There will be prizes for team of the month and then overall 1^st and 2^nd.

The monthly prize is £250 off your next order (within the next 3 months please).

The overall prizes need to be claimed by start of the next football season.  1^st prize £1,000 and 2^nd prize £500.

Let the fantasy commence!

Best regards,

Mark Dent

Business Development Director – The Americas

Sample Answers

UK C/M +44 (0) 79 2006 2166

Skype mark.dent0

E   mark.dent@sampleanswers.com
W  http://www.sampleanswers.com/

By Tony Dent

Once again Sample Answers organised this year’s MRS golf day in support of the Market Research Benevolent Fund and, once again, the evening raffle produced a remarkable £400 contribution to the fund. Thanks to all those providing the prizes and congratulations to all the players who so cheerfully emptied their pockets for the cause!

The day began at 7.30 am with bacon sandwiches at Chobham Golf Club and the following 12 hours included the individual Stapleford competition, lunch of ham and eggs and then the Greensomes pairs competition – 36 holes of golf!   All of which led to the evening entertainment of prize giving, beer and sandwiches, culminating in the successful prize draw raffle.

We are particularly grateful to our sponsors

This year’s Winners

Morning Individual Stapleford

Afternoon Greensomes Pairs

New ‘Election Special’ discounted rates for all UK RDD until June 30th 2017

Unbiased RDD sample ready for you. 

Following Theresa May’s recent announcement of a general election to take place on June 8th 2017, we’re ready to provide the Market Research industry with all the sample you require to enable unbiased and representative telephone polling. Experience shows us that the best way to gain unbiased telephone samples is to use RDD (Random Digit Dial) numbers which are randomly generated.

More RDD than any other provider

Here at Sample Answers, we have produced RDD for the Market Research industry for over two decades. Today, we offer more experience in producing dual frame RDD than any other sample provider. Check out RDD on our website now.

New ‘Election Special’ discounts

To help you to make use of the most established statistically representative RDD samples, we’re introducing an ‘Election Special’, with discounted rates for all UK RDD sales right through until the end of June 2017. This will enable you to survey opinions in the most unbiased and representative way, both pre and post election.

RDD – fresh to order

Unlike many other suppliers of RDD, here at Sample Answers, we make our RDD fresh for each new order rather than relying on pre-created stock which can be out of date. All of our seeds are current and our line verification is processed at the time of the order to make sure that your bespoke RDD order is as up to date as possible. You can expect next day delivery of any single country order.

We’re ready. Are you?

To take advantage of our new ‘Election Special’ discounted rates with the best quality, most up to date RDD, call our client services team today on 0208 274 5000 or email us at clientservices@sampleanswers.com

Phil Bird
Managing Director
Sample Answers Ltd.
www.sampleanswers.com

Now there’s a question!

After UK elections for parliament in 2015, a referendum in 2016, the Scottish referendum in 2014 and their national election last year, not forgetting voting for the Welsh and Northern Ireland assemblies, are we ready for another full parliamentary battle?   In particular – can the opinion pollsters cope? All researchers will be well aware of the doubts about the reliability of the recent opinion polls expressed by many observers both in the UK and overseas.

These doubts have led to considerable controversy concerning research and sampling methods, with much of the controversy surrounding the interminable dispute between telephone and online data collection. Theoretically there should be no doubt that a genuine telephone study using an RDD (Random Digit Dial) sample should have the edge over the self–selecting process endemic to on-line research.

However, in practice, the results from the two methods aren’t as readily distinguished as the different sample methods would suggest.   With declining response rates and the cost / time pressures frequently placed upon telephone research, the quality of the ‘sample’ as selected can be quickly eroded into what is effectively also a self-selecting sample, albeit one with more control information available. This similarity is further emphasised by the manner in which both online and telephone polls will be subject to similar demographic quota controls.

Despite those similarities, there will, of course, be some major differences in the way the two methods achieve the final sample

For example, the landline telephone sample will rapidly ‘fill’ the older (65 and over) age group because older people are more likely to be at home whatever time of the day the phone rings. Indeed in the UK it was a finding from the 2015 polling that, probably, it would be important in future to split the age quota, because too many over 75’s were filling the 65+ group and (possibly) that fact had introduced a labour bias into some of the polls.

Nowadays, of course, no-one would do a telephone study without using both a landline and a mobile sample to ensure coverage of the population

But do we understand all the probabilities? How many of the mobile phone sample could also have been selected within the landline sample (and vice versa)?   Reading the literature I can find no reference to weighting by the varying probabilities associated with a telephone sample and, possibly, it is the case that possession of landline only / mobile only / both mobile and landline is entirely neutral in regard to voting intentions. However, I have some doubts about this neutrality, since there is increasing evidence that social class is nowadays less significant as an indicator of voting intention than usage of social media.

Whichever way you look at it, the pollsters are once again in for a difficult time

There simply is no consensus as to how to fix whatever it was that went wrong in the past. A lot of the old models built to re-calibrate the results by distributing ‘don’t knows’ based on past behaviour have had to be thrown away and new ideas wait to be tried and tested.

My own idea is that time of day is important both for online and for telephone work. I would like to see much more attention paid to the time of day the response is obtained and examine the differences in responses by time of day. That has been found to influence some online survey results and could similarly affect telephone research.

Are any of the pollsters looking at that?

One thing for sure is that the rest of us will be looking at the polls with interest. Will it strengthen the ‘Remainers’ and allow a soft Brexit? Will Jeremy Corbyn break through to the wider electorate? How will the Scots and the Northern Irish vote?

It has been said that the Chinese curse was ‘may you live in interesting times’! With Donald Trump, North Korea, Putin, Syria, Brexit, Scottish Independence and, above all, non-probability samples – I can safely say enough is enough!

Tony Dent, Chairman, Sample Answers