QuestionPro Blog

Do You Need Representative Sample?

One of the most frustrating experiences for clients and agencies alike is a sample supplier’s inability to supply representative traffic into their surveys. Nationally representative sample is relatively easy to achieve when basing it on present quotas, but it is much harder for providers to balance starts based on Age, Gender, Geography, Income, and Education. Typical industry practices are to use “balanced outgo” – meaning that nationally representative batches of e-mails are sent out. The problem with this practice is that most suppliers are not able to control for variances in response rates that can be as high as 20% among different audiences. In the simplest case, you could send 50/50 M/F invitations and end up with 40/60 split upon survey entry (starts). This leads to additional weighting, or a need to over sample.

Balanced Starts
We found that representative, balanced starts are essential in providing the highest levels of quality and accuracy for online research, which is why we came up with Peanut Labs Balanced Starts. This allows us to accurately target and deliver representative starts across a variety of variables and ensures that your sample plan is followed precisely. PL Balanced Starts is NOT a traffic routing system, but rather evaluates known profile data for each respondent at the start of the survey, in real time, and ensures national representation with on time delivery.

More info:

• Peanut Labs (place Balanced Starts in the “more info” box): http://peanutlabs.com
• QuestionPro Integration with Peanut Labs: http://www.questionpro.com//help/54.html