By Fortune Hi- Tech Marketing Biz Now January 30, 2010
I am sure you will agree with me that people that go to college to get their Bachelor's degree study hard and work hard. So why is that when it comes to working from home and people say they want to make over $5,000 a month, they will not put in the time and effort to learn how to do so. Can you make over $5,000 per month working from home? Absolutely!!! Now the question I ask you, "Are you self disciplined and self motivated to learn how to do so?" If yes, and you are looking for an awesome company and leader to partner up with me, give me a call or email me. KC Haddock - fhtmbiznow@gmail.com -www. kchaddock.com-www.squidoo.com/1fhtm ...read more
By Anonymous December 09, 2009
We have had problems targeting customers and figuring out if we were having a return on investment. From working with Evans Analytics for the past three months we have been able to see what demographics were our target audience and what we were doing wrong. Their in dept analysis showed us how to cut costs and improve our bottom line. They provided us with comprehensive marketing research, analytics, data analysis and Data Management Services. We would recommend their services to anyone who is looking to stay competitive on analytics and make since of their data. Vice President at Private Pharmacology Company ...read more
Many books have been written over the past 50 years about writing questionnaires, starting with Stanley Payne’s book, The Art of Asking Questions (Payne, 1951). Yes, writing questions is an art, but there has been considerable research that has emerged from the collective experience of survey research professionals to create objective, reliable, and valid information. Hundreds of surveys are conducted each year among a wide variety of companies, such as advertisers to measure customer awareness, insurance companies to measure satisfaction, and school districts to measure student, parent, or staff satisfaction, to name just a few. Many of these surveys include some assortment of Likert scales. ALikert scale, as most of you know, is a measure of the strength of agreement, degree of importance, or level of satisfaction with a statement. When asking respondent’s to provide a response, what are you doing? You are asking them to provide their opinion or attitude on something and can be thought of as a set of propositions about beliefs, evaluations, and actions held by individuals. Very often a numerical value to the response categories, summed, and averaged by the total number of the items/questions to create a scale, followed by some analysis. Let’s put aside for a moment how to analyze the data and focus on the actual survey questions. A closed-ended question has two parts: the statement of the question (sometimes referred to as the question stem) and the response categories. Much has been written about guidelines of the question stem: keep it simple, avoid double-barreled questions, adjust the language appropriate for your respondents, make the questions specific, to name just a few. Offering different response categories, in and of themselves, can make a huge difference in the percentage of respondents agreeing or satisfied. Below are results of a recent parent survey of a major school district: My child can use school computers before or after school. 2008(N=9,689) 2009(N=5,587) Strongly agree 6.3% 11.4% Agree 11.3% 18.7% Disagree 14.3% 12.5% Strongly disagree 5.6% 5.0% Not applicable/Don’t know -- 52.4% Not applicable 10.7% Don’t know 51.8% Do you really think that in one year the level of agreement (strongly agree+agree) increased by 12.5 percentage points? Maybe, but not likely. And, yes, the difference is way beyond sampling error….By changing the response categories, the percentage agreement changed significantly. Imagine again, if one deleted both the Not applicable and the Don’t Know response categories. This example clearly addresses potential problems with reliability and validity of measures due to varying response categories used on surveys and can lead to incorrect interpretations of the data. Check back tomorrow and the next several days to see how to address four important and interrelated areas of developing survey questions. 1.Deciding on the number of points on a scale 2.Placing odd vs. even number of points on a scale 3.Providing a middle category such as “Neither.” 4.Including “Not Applicable,” “Don’t Know,” “Not sure,” or “No Opinion.”Steven J. Finkxml version='1.0' encoding='%SOUP-ENCODING%'Statistics&Analytics ConsultantEvans Analytics ...read more
By Evans Analytics, LLC September 14, 2011
If my experience is anything like yours, you have spent countless hours in meetings discussing and debating how many points should be on a scale. “Absolutely 4 points,” one says emphatically. “Respondents can’t distinguish any more than 4 points.” “Seven points is the best” another one says in response. “We need more points to optimize the variance.” After an uncomfortable silence, a third replies sheepishly, “Actually, it depends.” A loud groan pervades the meeting. They can’t all be right, can they? In the research field, there is much debate how many points and what kind of scale labels should make up the survey. If a survey is constructed using a 4 point scale, providing scale labels for all response categories is recommended. For example, one might encounter the following scale. Strongly Disagree Disagree Agree Strongly Agree 1 2 3 4 In contrast, a 7-point scale (or higher) includes labels only at the end points, especially if administered on the phone (it takes too long time to read all the labels!). Strongly Disagree 2 3 4 5 6 Strongly Agree 1 7 For many researchers, the 4-point scale is ordinal—the labels arenotequidistant to each other and one cannot (though many do) run summary statistics; one is limited to counts and percentages (Frequencies and Crosstabs). The 7-point scale follows the properties of an interval scale and allows one to analyze data using a variety of statistical analysis, including t-tests, ANOVA, etc. Here’s another point to consider: how would you like to report your data? Using the 4-point scale, one could report that 30% of respondents indicated they agreed, and another 20% strongly agreed. If one uses the 7-point scale, one would report that the mean response was 6.1 (hardly meaningful to policymakers). Further, do you intend to collapse the 7-point scale into high, medium, or low categories, or use some threshold level (such as any rating greater than 5). If you plan to group the data anyway, stick with fewer response categories. So, in sum, our third respondent was right (another groan?). The number of points on a scale does depend, mostly how you intend to analyze and report the data.Steven J. FinkStatistics&Analytics ConsultantEvans Analytics Next blog: Placing odd vs. even number of points on a scale ...read more
By Evans Analytics, LLC September 14, 2011
Biotechnology is an area within biology where technology and engineering are used to study living organisms. Methods used in biotechnology are also used to manufacture and create biological products. These biological products are used in the creation of medication and to conduct research in genetic en... ...read more
Botany is the study of plants and their environment. This is one the most popular areas of study for science fair projects. Usually, these experiments require few supplies, and they make a perfect introduction to the scientific method for young students. As a result of the broad nature of this field o... ...read more