How can you ensure your marketing research is respectful of participants' time?

Being respectful of participant's time has several dimensions. Some simple ways being 1. Profile them for relevance 2. Ask Permission and convenient time/date for interview 3. Use simple, lay-man's language in your questionnaires/discussion guides 4. Keep your questionnaires/discussion guides short 5. If it's a longitudinal study, seek out convenient time during a window when u need to contact them again 6. In case interviewer can't make at a pre-decided time, call them and let them know. Don't keep them waiting. 7. Explain objective of study and be patient with them.

Being respectful of participants' time is less about the research methods and a lot about the researchers/clients' awareness and appreciation that this is an important consideration with direct impact on data quality. Currently, unfortunately the power sits with the researchers/clients who get away with long and uninteresting surveys as the respondents are panelists who are willing to do a lot for meagre payouts. Like it was 15+ years back (before advent of panels), the power should be back in the hands of respondents. Only then will efforts be made by the research industry to focus on delivering better quality respondent experience

Ensuring that your research is respectful of participants' time is a SUPER critical question but unfortunately very few researchers/clients care when designing the questionnaire. Why so? Panels as the main source of recruitment for quant research globally. These panels are made up of professional respondents who fill-up surveys for meagre payouts and are willing to still complete the surveys even when they are long, boring and even full of irrelevant questions. Imagine a world where the respondent completed the survey because they found the survey interesting and respectful of their time and not because they had to. The positive impact on data quality would be immense and would lead to better decisions made based on those quality insights

This is more about the 'relevance' of the questions being asked as well as the 'need'. Simple advise: - Don't ask questions that are not relevant to the respondent. E.g. Asking respondents to rate a brand on very specific 20 image statements when he/she knows nothing about the brand apart from its name. - Do not ask questions you don't need to ask (you can derive/infer from other questions, past surveys) or questions that you will not use the data of in your analysis. In a typical Usage and Attitude survey 25%+ of data points are not used in the core analysis /storytelling. The questionnaire could have been 25% shorter and there would be no impact on quality of insights

Based on my experience, I will take a contrarian view and say that actually incentives themselves are the main cause why most of the surveys are currently not respectful of respondent's time As explained in my earlier post above, the research industry does not prioritise respecting respondent's time as they know that all they have to do to compensate for their long boring survey is pay few more cents to respondents. Unfortunately, a typical panelist is so driven by meagre payouts that they will accept such a one-sided value exchange. This needs a fundamental shakeup.