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No, You’re Not a Data Scientist
The hottest new job title invading the world of market research is “data scientist.” It has many of us starting to wonder, aren’t we all data scientists? Whether quantitative or qualitative, we spend...
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Hurdles to Using Big Data
Last year, Gartner, which charts new trends and emerging technologies via its “Hype Cycle” tracking, decided to abandon its tracking of Big Data. The reason? Big data, they said, has become so...
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Election Season’s Dumb Statistics
A favorite pastime in my household is to laugh at the absurd statistics our local weatherman conjures up to make his reports sound dramatic, scientific, and driven by a deep analysis of data. Things...
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A Fun and Easy Way to Try R
Data wonks have more fun than you may think. If you have not yet begun working with the R statistical program (which is mesmerizing, extremely powerful, hard to learn, but weirdly intuitive, and FREE)...
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Data Geniuses Who Predict the Past
If there is one thing I hope you remember from your college statistics class, it’s this: Correlation does not imply causation. This is especially important to remember in our world of big data. Any...
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Statistically Significant Sample Sizes
There are no magic numbers for sample size. There is no such thing as a statistically significant sample. There is no such thing as a statistically significant sample size. Unfortunately, those two...
View ArticlePlease Don’t Mix Your MaxDiffs
Customizing MaxDiff exercises by piping in text from previous survey answers might seem like a good idea, but analyst beware: if you are estimating individual-level scores using hierarchical Bayes or...
View ArticleForget the Math — For Good Sampling You Need Equality, Inclusion, and...
In basic stats class, all of us learned about the importance of random sampling. It provides the foundation for the iron-clad mathematics of estimation, statistical significance, and margins of error....
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A Better Way to Get Census Data
The U.S. Census is one of the most useful tools for research and marketing because it tells you how many people fit specific demographic profiles and where they live. It started out as a simple count...
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Don’t Be Fooled by the Mean (or How to Avoid Absurd Statistical Claims in...
Even smart people get tripped up by simple statistics, as this statement from a recent New Yorker article demonstrates: A hundred years ago, most Americans died in their mid-fifties. This was written...
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