Abstract:

While the buyers of goods and services usually rely on solid quality criteria to check the quality of what they buy, the clients of consulting service enterprises, such as market or opinion research firms, rarely do so. As a result, the clients make their decisions on a basis of irrelevant deliberations and of cost comparisons, choosing the least expensive offer rather than the best. However, it is vital for market and public opinion research to apply harsh quality criteria, for low- quality research is detrimental not only to the firms concerned but to the general public as a whole. This paper presents a checklist of ten criteria to test the quality of surveys.