April 16, 2012
First Rule of Panel Management is Do Unto Others
By Susan Frede, VP, Research
When it comes to panel management and survey design the golden rule is key: do unto others as you would have others do unto you. As researchers we frequently ask panelists to do things that we would never dream of doing if in their shoes.
An important part of panel management is understanding the panelist life cycle and what causes panelists to leave the panel. Understanding this allows us to implement changes to reduce panelist attrition. Recently, at Lightspeed Research we analyzed a multitude of data about panelists’ survey taking behavior for our panels in the US, UK, Germany and France.
In the US, analysis of the first two survey experiences after joining the panel finds that first impressions are important. When panelists join the panel they need to have good experiences on surveys.
- Those who have a second action are more likely to have completed a survey in their first action.
- On the other hand, those who do not have a second action are more likely to have dropped out of their first survey experience. This speaks to the importance of giving new panelists engaging surveys.
- Surprisingly, those who do not have a second action are actually less likely to have been screened out of their first survey experience. We speculate that new panelists don’t initially realize they are being screened out, but over time they do realize this and it can lead to panelist attrition.
We also examined panelists’ last three survey experiences. This analysis shows the importance of survey design. Not only does poor design lead to problems on individual surveys, it also leads to panelist attrition. Those who leave the panel (have not responded in past three months) are generally more likely to have dropped out of one or more of their last three survey experiences.
In addition, those who have not been active in the past three months are more likely to have taken a longer survey as one or more of their last three actions.
Clearly, researchers need to abide by the golden rule. The more positive experiences a panelist has the longer they will be retained on the panel.
Category:Data Quality, Panel Management, Panel Quality, Panel Retention, Research on Research, Survey Best Practices
Posted on April 16, 2012
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