Robert Bain
Features Editor, Research, London, UK
I look after the features content for Research-live.com and Research Magazine, and contribute to the blogs.
Recent activity
Blog Posts (56)
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Consultation or nonsultation?
In the Daily Telegraph, Andrew Gilligan has been having a go at ‘nonsultations’ – cynical attempts by government to lend legitimacy to pre-determined decisions, masquerading as consultation exercises.
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The difficulty of proving your point
The debate over the bestselling book The Spirit Level is a reminder of how much people’s view of (or interest in) the evidence can be influenced by what they already think.
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Is anybody listening?
The UK’s new government has been keen to position itself as one that listens, using crowdsourcing in high-profile attempts to garner comments and suggestions. But questions are already being asked about whether it really wants to hear ideas.
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In iPad we trust?
We couldn’t help but be a little bit concerned at reports earlier this week about how the iPad had given a boost to market research interviewers, by suddenly making the public more interested in them.
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No time like the present
Tim Harford had a nice article this weekend about how working out what might happen in the future is only slightly more difficult than working out what’s happening now.
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Comments (8)
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Comment on: Focus pocus
Hi Simon I agree, and I think it goes beyond bad use of focus groups. I fear that the term 'focus group' has become a kind of shorthand for misguided research – very easy for commentators to knock. That seems to be the case in the MediaPost article - as you say, there's no detail on how focus groups were used by these firms - the simple statement that they used them is sufficient condemnation.
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Comment on: Between an MROC and a hard place
Thanks for that Jeffrey – I didn't realise it was Brad that coined MROC. Mike Hall did also make the important point that research represents the 'fusion element' in any branded community – the one business discipline that is central to the use of the community for any purpose, be it marketing, brand building, feedback, whatever. But that still doesn't make it a research community, apparently.
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Comment on: Between an MROC and a hard place
Mike - in the light of your comment I listened back to my slightly fuzzy recording of our chat, and I see I misquoted you above as saying 'branded communities' instead of 'brand communities' – a distinction that I wasn't so sensitive to at the time! Sorry – amended now.
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Comment on: Think first, then speak
Thanks for your comment Ray. I wasn't trying to suggest that 'fast' is a synonym for ‘real-time’, but that 'real-time' gets thrown about without much thought because people think it sounds good. So it's helpful to consider whether you mean anything more than just 'fast' or 'now', which, in many cases that I’ve seen, would be simpler and more precise alternatives. We appreciate that language changes and can’t be controlled, and it gets on our nerves when people see change only as decline. What I’ve tried to highlight here are words that I feel get in the way of communication when they are used without thought. They’re all useful in their place, but people fall back on them because they sound fashionable or clever or businessy or just because they're the words everyone else is using, when there may be a more effective way of getting across what they mean. It's not about arbitrary rules, it's about putting thought into what words mean and what effect they have.
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Comment on: Another day, another accusation of polling bias
When I say YouGov "deny the accusation", I mean that they deny the accusation of push polling. They don't deny testing people's reactions to negative statements about Nick Clegg (and it's no surprise that these results were for their client's own use rather than for publication). That's a legitimate and not uncommon type of opinion research. A push poll, on the other hand, is basically a campaign message disguised as a poll, which is clearly dishonest and wrong. Of course, some people may find the testing of negative messages distasteful too, but then, this is an election campaign.
Discussions (2)
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Short story competition: Market research in 2029
You might not have expected to see the words ‘short’, ‘story’ and ‘competition’ together on these pages, but here they are. We want you to embrace your inner novelist and give us your vision of the f
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Pronunciation of "MROC"
Are we saying "em-ar-oh-see" or "em-roc" ? Or are we still saying "market research online community"? Is it different on different sides of the Atlantic? I am intrigued.
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