Beyond Simple Descriptive Statistics: Utility of Multivariate Techniques in Survey Research

• Activity Number: 664
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Thursday, August 4, 2011 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Survey Research Methods
• Author(s): Mansour Fahimi*+
• Companies: Marketing Systems Group
• Keywords: Multivariate Techniques ; Key Drivers ; Satisfaction Surveys

Abstract

There are several notable distinctions between survey and market research practices. While survey researchers tend to focus on design and administration details, market researchers often pay less attention to the upfront activities and instead focus resources on the analysis and interpretation of the results. That is, survey researchers are typically design-heavy/analysis-light when in contrast market researchers are design-light/analysis-heavy. This historical divide, however, is not inevitable as it can be bridged by taking advantage of the best practices the two schools of research offer. Motivations for this collaboration include, on the one hand, the growing appreciation among survey researchers for more sophisticated analytical methods, and on the other, the increasing awareness among market researchers about the fact that such methods can fail to produce actionable intelligence when applied to survey data of questionable quality. The author will present examples of what additional information can be obtained from survey data when the employed analytics extend beyond what simple descriptive statistics may be able to reveal. In particular, this presentation will discuss