A Better Quality Online Access Panel - The New Lake Market Research Access Panel

Jan. 26, 2010 - PRLog -- Online panels for market research have grown dramatically in the past decade offering a valuable alternative to traditional methodologies but before describing our new Lake Access panel of almost 2 million members we should give a warning. We understand the dangers of access panels and are honest about them so we think you should know them too.

Danger 1 - you are interviewing people who may have already become educated by doing other surveys for other companies, so beware of relying on the accuracy of certain types of question

Danger 2 - there are certain topics you cannot cover. For example, you cannot track changes in the use of the internet for buying your goods and services amongst all of your customers. You can only track change amongst those who already use the internet.

Danger 3 - panelists are self selecting. Whilst you may be buying a sample of respondents who are demographically representative they may not be attitudinally representative.

Furthermore, you must bear in mind the motives for their becoming involved.

We could go on, but we do not want to put you off entirely.

So why are we doing an access panel?

Most of our work has been involved with properly recruited respondents from all of the population using traditional methodologies. This experience has given us the ability to recognise and advise on the best practices. With research budgets being cut, we recognise that some customers are sacrificing accuracy for quantity. While we would love to sell you a statistically sound survey we feel that if you must take risks the least we can do is to provide a research vehicle that reduces the potential hazards and the downsides as much as possible.

So why use our panel?

We are honest. We admit the errors in access panel research and as a result, try hard to remove the inaccuracies.

Our panel conforms to the latest ESOMAR and MRS codes of conduct

We have teamed up with partners who provide panelists who have not been specifically recruited for research. They are recruited from people who are collecting points for purchases such as air miles. It seems to us that using panelists recruited specifically for research means that they are even more likely to be attitudinally unrepresentative.

Finally, we check the accuracy of our panel by regularly running check questions on our monthly omnibus survey using conventional random sampling methodology. We include regular questions on our omnibus to provide comparative data to check the accuracy of the panel. Where relevant we will also include customers key questions to provide confirmation of the accuracy of panel finding and where necessary the basis for weighting the data.

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Lake Market Research is a full service market research agency offering all treaditional methodologies as well as new technologies.