Data is the fuel that powers market research, driving the insights that shape business strategies. But what happens when that fuel is contaminated? At The Link Group, we’re committed to ensuring its purity and are proud to be at the forefront of a crucial industry initiative to define and measure data quality.
The Quest for “Good” Data
The Insights Association, in collaboration with other leading organizations in the Global Data Quality initiative, has launched a groundbreaking study: “Quantifying ‘Good’ Data Quality.” This report is a significant step forward in establishing the first ever industry-wide quantitative benchmarks for data quality, moving beyond subjective discussions and setting the stage for continuous improvement.
Key Insights from the Benchmarking Report
The base wave of the Data Quality Benchmarking Initiative reveals important insights:
- Pre-Survey Metrics: There is more we can be doing as an industry to better target participants to close the gap on study sold vs. actual incidence rate. This can happen in both screener creation on the agency side and stronger targeting on the supplier side.
- In-Survey Metrics: Most of the industry benchmarks fall into this category and one of the more striking is the current removal rates. This is something as an industry we can work towards reducing well below 43%. Abandon rate is another metric that stood out, as it signals the need to ensure the respondent experience in survey is more seamless to promote finishing the survey and future participation in market research.
- Post-Survey Metrics: We know data quality checks take place both in-survey and post-survey, so it is a helpful discussion point to think through the balance between these two methods. Seeing this metric hopefully broken out by industry and incidence rate in the future may help determine the right balance for different audiences.
The Link Group: Champions of Data Integrity
Our dedication to data quality is more than just talk. Andrew Hunt, Senior Research Director at The Link Group, is an active contributor to the Council for Data Integrity and one of the core members of the team who helped created this benchmarking report. Andrew’s participation on the committee and The Link Group’s participation in the data collection process highlights our commitment to being leaders in data quality.
We know that our clients make critical business decisions based on the findings we share in our reports, so we are hyper focused on ensuring the data to make those decisions is high quality. As part of this commitment, The Link Group also has an internal task force dedicated to constantly innovating our approach to catch fraud in-survey and exploring outside tools / technologies to aid us.
The Path Forward for Data Quality
The baseline wave of the Insights Association’s benchmarking report is a major milestone, but the journey to higher data quality is ongoing for everyone in the industry. This initiative is step one to understand where the industry is as a whole and creates a baseline for us to track progress overtime. Looking ahead, the Insights Association plans to make some improvements to the data collection tool to help encourage more companies to participate, push to create benchmarks within key industries specifically, and plans to open participation up to other countries outside of the US to eventually create global benchmarks. At The Link Group, we’re excited to be part of this journey, working to improve data quality and drive the future of market research!
Want to learn more about our commitment to data quality and how it can benefit your next research project? Contact us today!
