How does the United States Consumer Study work?

How does the United States Consumer Study work?

The United States Consumer Study is an online survey administered by our survey panel partners.  The survey is not a pop up that interrupts your web browsing experience.

Survey Collection Partners

We do not maintain our own survey panel. Instead, we partner with industry leaders to source sample from their panels. We maintain exclusive control of our survey content and user experience, enabling unmatched speed and versatility in syndicated research. Panelists are invited to take the survey either via email or an online portal – all of which is administered by the panel partner. Our partners have a double opt-in process to ensure panelists know they have joined a survey panel. Panelists opt in on recruitment to the panel, and again via an email link to take the survey.

Sampling

All of our survey partners are thoroughly vetted on recruitment, sampling, and privacy practices, using ESOMAR (http://www.esomar.org/publications-store/codes-guidelines.php) and CASRO (http://www.casro.org/?page=TheCASROCode) standards. All of our partners use a double opt-in process to ensure that panelists know and understand that they have joined a survey panel, opting in on recruitment to the panel, and confirming opt-in via email link. The partners maintain a demographically representative panel, and consistently monitor and respond to panel health through new recruitment and retention techniques.

Privacy

All partners have clear privacy policies available to their respondents. While the partners collect PII from the respondent upon registration (to deliver incentive, verify accuracy, and remove duplication), Resonate never receives this PII.  All respondents are identified to Resonate by an alphanumeric panelist key and Resonate has no access to connect that key with any PII. The vendor, who can associate the key to PII, has no access to any of the Resonate survey data. Therefore, no party can ever make a connection between survey response and PII.

Incentives

Survey respondents are incented for answering Resonate surveys. The partners are responsible for determining appropriate incentives to balance response rate and appeal across a wide variety of panelists. Most providers offer several different types of incentives, to maintain a representative sample, including cash, points, gift cards, charitable donations, loyalty rewards, etc. The partner is responsible for the distribution of the incentive to the respondent, either electronically or through postal mail, as applicable.

Balanced Sample

Resonate ensures that our surveys are representative of the total online adult population through quotas and weights. The first step occurs at recruitment, where we strictly enforce a series of demographic quotas designed to ensure that our sample matches the composition of the online adult population across the characteristics of:

1. Age/gender composite
2. Income
3. Ethnicity
4. Region of the country

During the survey loading process, respondents are rebalanced through weighting across demographic and behavioral elements to best represent the total adult online population.  We weight on:

1. Age/gender composite,
2. Income
3. Ethnicity
4. Region of the country
5. Education
6. Presence of children
7. Registered to vote
8. Time spent online. 

Imputing Data

The Resonate Survey is fielded multiple times per year. In each survey wave, all respondents are asked a consistent set of core questions—typically demographics, consumer preferences, values and motivations, media, health and pharma, etc. Additionally, each survey wave may also include questions on a specific industry vertical, such as Automotive, Travel, Finance, etc. 

In order to allow our clients to build audiences and obtain Insights using any attribute in any survey wave, we impute some respondents’ answers to non-core questions.

To accomplish this, we model the unanswered industry vertical survey attributes using answered core and industry vertical survey attributes. We continue this process sequentially, drawing values from the initial models to be used in subsequent models--a process known as Imputations by Chained Equations. Once the imputed values are calculated, they are evaluated to ensure that they are consistent with the non-imputed values. Inconsistent imputations are eliminated and the remaining values are utilized in the Resonate Analytics platform for insights on survey-based audiences.