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Can I ask more than one question?
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The 3rd degree system has a full survey designer allowing you to create multi question surveys complete with routing
and cyclic questions, as well as info messages. All the response data is automatically collated and formatted into an online summary report.
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Can I run long surveys?
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Obviously respondents will quickly become fatigued by huge surveys that take a long time to complete. We actually believe
this is a problem for other methods too, particularly self completion methods, and can lead to inaccurate results. The 3rd
degree's T3D methodology advocates distributing longer surveys to a larger matched sample base over a period of time. Our
'cyclic' questions make this quick and easy to manage.
Recent research has show that people hold social conversations in a 'little and often' format via text. They will often
hold a conversation over a period of hours or days. This method is both natural and socially acceptable and less demanding
of a person's time. By taking this same approach to surveying we can ask respondents to complete surveys in a more natural
social context. This has several advantages including reducing respondent fatigue, and reducing colouration effects.
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It looks great for opinion polling but what else can I do with it?
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Like any methodology mobile research is great at some things and not so good at others. Yes it's great at opinion polling; it's also
ideal for customer satisfaction surveying, ad recall, tracking surveys and diary applications for a start. It's also uniquely positioned
for applications where you want to survey a respondent in a particular location, say in-store or at a particular time without the cost or
potential for colouration of using an interviewer. There is no need to distribute expensive equipment such as PDAs or laptops in such cases either.
It's great at combining both qual and quant techniques, such as using text as a way of running follow ups and 'call backs' or in testing the
findings of qual research with a wider audience. In fact mobile methods are applicable for many types of research with no hard and fast rules
about their application. The mobile methodology also opens the door to some unique opportunities that were previously unfeasable or too costly
to be considered.
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Are all of the questions issued in one go?
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No. Each question is delivered in order, one at a time. This is to ensure that any routing logic is followed correctly and to avoid confusing
the participant with lots of messages in one go. It is nice to let the participant know roughly how many questions they are likely to answer in the
survey using an info message before it starts and a finishing message to let them know they have answered the last one.
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What are the system requirements?
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All you need is a web browser and access to the Internet. The 3rd Degree software uses robust standards compliant HTML and should work in most
browsers that conform to W3C standards. We test against Internet Explorer 6, Firefox 1 and Safari 1.2 but the system should work fine with pretty
much any modern browser. We don't recommend versions of IE earlier than 5.5 because of security flaws in the browser. In fact we recommend that
you use the latest version of any browser and keep you operating system patched with the most current updates.
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Aren't only young people into mobile phones and texting?
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It's a myth that only young people have mobile phones. The mobile is a much more accessible technology for older people than the PC, and many
are encouraged by children and grand children to learn to text as a cheap means of staying in regular contact. Saga radio was flooded with text messages
when it launched it's text service and Age Concern and Help the Aged amongst others, have launched initiatives to help the older generations get into texting.
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What about demographic reach, isn't the Internet better?
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The mobile phone has the largest socio demographic reach of any electronic communications device and reaches many more people from ethnic, low income
and older socio demographic groups than the PC. Recent studies have shown that over 70% of mobile users make use of text messaging and it is growing every day.
In the UK alone 2.16 billion messages are sent each month.
Without question mobile has the widest demographic reach of any electronic research, it is a classless and ageless medium.
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