The purpose of market research surveys is to gather information from respondents so that data can be aggregated. You can then detect patterns, trends and opinions, generating real insights.
The main purpose of this website is to show you how to use QPSMR. QPSMR is a market research software product to prepare surveys, collect data and produce meaningful analysis.
However, this page explains some of the background to market research and how you might use QPSMR to conduct market research. You can find our training videos and other QPSMR resources on this website. You will also find more details about the product’s benefits on our main website.
So, let’s start by looking at the overall survey process and then work through each part and see how QPSMR might help you.
Once you have decided the topic of your survey, you will need to design a questionnaire that will elicit the information you are seeking from your respondents. You will need to take to make sure your sample is representative. You will send some excellent guidance on the ESOMAR website.
The following steps can be carried using software like QPSMR:
Let’s look at each of these in more detail and see how QPSMR can help.
A questionnaire may be anything from a handful of questions to a long questionnaire, possibly with different sections. You may want different types of respondents to answer different parts of your survey.
Your questionnaire may also have a variety of question types. Questions can have a pre-defined list of responses that a respondent can choose. Alternatively, questions can be completely open so that the exact words that a respondent wishes to say or write down can be recorded. This is covered in more depth below.
You can also conduct surveys in a number of different ways. You can use interviewers to ask questions in a one-to-one situation. This can be face-to-face or over a telephone connection. You may also ask respondents to complete the survey themselves in a number of ways, although usually self-completion surveys are conducted online. Again, this topic is covered in more detail below.
QPSMR can be used for all these types of surveys with the exception of computer-assisted web surveys (CAWI), often referred to as online surveys. For online surveys, we can recommend one of our other market research software products. You can use either our Snap Surveys software for market research surveys or The CYS Platform if you want short surveys that collect customer feedback. The CYS Platform comes with a full online dashboard reporting system. Snap Surveys has a complete set of tools for charting and reporting.
Most surveys require the use of different question types. QPSMR is a market research software product which handles all the types you need.
If you are new to handling surveys, you will quickly find that there are many other tools you will need to build professional surveys. Here is an example of some of the tools QPSMR has that you are likely to need.
Filters – you will want to apply filters to certain questions or sections of your questionnaire as it will not be appropriate for everyone to answer every question
Randomisation – Respondents are often biased towards the first answer on a list of possible answers. Where possible, it often makes sense to randomise the order of responses, particularly when there is a long list. Similarly, you sometimes want to randomise the order of questions, particularly if you are collection information about several products, for example.
Quota sampling and screening – You often want to control the number of respondents with demographics or specific characteristics that complete your surveys. Further, you may want to screen out certain potential participants – for example, those who do not use a product regularly.
The tools you need when collecting data will be dependent on whether the data is being collected on paper or on a device such as a laptop, tablet, smartphone or over the telephone.
If you are collecting answers to questions on paper, you will generally need to have tools that can ‘clean’ the data after you have entered the data in the questionnaires. You will need to check that answers are logically correct and that respondents and/or interviewers have not made mistakes or misunderstood instructions.
In such cases, you will need to have tools that allow you to view, edit and, where necessary, delete data. It is usually best to carry out this work as a ‘batch’ process, finding and reporting errors and inconsistences and then fixing them for a batch or all the questionnaires. QPSMR has all the tools you need for all these tasks.
Where data is collected on a device, the software used to collect that data will usually ensure that there are no logical errors. Consequently, you will need tools within the software to ensure that respondents only answer the questions you want them to answer. You can eliminate illogical data, such as where figures should add to 100% by re-asking questions. Of course, you can still amend data after it has been collected. QPSMR has all the tools you need for these types of task.
QPSMR has a full set of tools to explore your data fully and produce meaningful analysis.
The most common methods are as follows:
Although QPSMR has a wide range of tools to produce cross-tabulations from your survey data, it is often a good idea to start with looking at some summary data. You can produce a report with summary counts (raw numbers) and/or percentages (frequencies). This can help you to decide how to analyse your data.
QPSMR allows you to do analysis on the largest projects, producing huge tables of figures. For example, you can produce a table with up to 5000 columns of data. Typically, you may want to analyse every question in your survey by gender, age, region and other demographics as well as other key questions, such as frequency of use.
You can explore your data to see what analysis makes sense quickly and easily with QPSMR.
The data drill down facilities in QPSMR allow you to explore you data so that you can prepare for fuller analysis. Data drill down will give clients/users of your data some rapid results with the minimum of preparation.
You can simply drag and drop questions and variables to build tables that allow you to interrogate your data. You can apply filters to these tables, so that you can look at different segments of your sample and compare results.
The data drill down facility means that you can get from data to initial findings in a matter of seconds. You can also see whether differences are significantly different. Then, when you are ready, you can proceed to producing a full set of cross-tabulations.
QPSMR has a powerful engine to process your survey data. Big projects with thousands of respondents and hundreds of tables can be processed quickly using QPSMR.
You can build variables so that data from one or more questions can be combined together in one table, producing more complex analyses. But, if you just want cross-tabulations of each questions by some standard demographics (often called a banner), you can generate these tables quickly and easily.
Applying filters to your tables so that you can look at some or all of your tables for subset of your data is easy to achieve. QPSMR comes with around 250 options that allow you to choose percentaging, statistical and many other output options. You won’t find more choice!
Your tables can be viewed and edited in text or spreadsheet format with a hyperlinked table of contents available in Excel format.
Having completed your data analysis, you may wish to share the project with clients or colleagues.
You can make your project and its data available with a few clicks so that others can use your questions, filters and variables to produce their own analysis.
This works well when clients or colleagues wish to explore data in more depth without having to contact the original data analyst. All your text and definitions are passed straight through to Resolve so that your clients can start work immediately.
A Premium version of Resolve is available for a small fee which allows customised outputs and proprietary calculations to be available.
Although it is easy to take figures and percentages from QPSMR and use them in reports and charts in Excel, PowerPoint, Google Sheets etc., you may want to prepare or automate reports or produce online dashboards.
Data from QPSMR can easily transfer your project to our Snap Surveys platform so that you can produce a high quality report or, even, automatically produce multiple reports. Snap also includes online data collection facilities for web surveys.
If you want to put data from QPSMR into an online dashboard, you can transfer your data in The CYS Platform so that you can use its high quality data visualisation tools.
QPSMR allows you to export your data easily so that you can use your QPSMR data in other specialist systems or market research software products:
