Our plans for a survey of how often different sorts of quant techniques are used has moved forwards and we appreciate the people who have sent us suggestions. Survey Analytics have allowed us to use a free account for the project and offered tech support, so many thanks to them for that.
Our thinking at the moment is that the survey will be organised into grids, with each grid having a theme and a range of likely frequencies within the grid. For example one grid might look Association techniques and might include correlations, cross-tabs, Cluster analysis (e.g. K means & Hierarchical) , Latent Class analysis, partial correlations, and Decision Trees (eg CHAID and CaRT).
Another group might look at Dependence approaches and list the regression and SEM type options. We do not necessarily plan to label these groups in the survey, as some people would put them in different places, for example we are probably going to put correspondence analysis with graphical techniques such as perceptual mapping, but it could be in association, similarly latent class could be in the dependence group. But we feel that putting the techniques into groups will help the respondents.
We have received several suggestions that we ought to include analysis packages. We have taken this idea on board, but we want to avoid it being simply a package ranking exercise, so our thinking is to have something like the following: SPSS, Systat, Excel, Sawtooth, Latent Class software (eg Latent Gold), SEM software (eg Lisrel & AMOS), R, Crosstab software (e.g. PSTAT, WinCross), integrated data collection/analysis software (e.g. CfMC, Confirmit, Survey Analytics).
We will have a type-in other in each grid and we will monitor the first 30 or so completes to see if we have missed anything vital.
We are planning to limit the demographics to just 2 questions 1) Country, 2) type of organisation (supplier, buyer/user, academic, other), with one open end.
One option we are considering is only asking each respondent to do a sub-set of the grids, but this makes cross-tabulations of techniques across the groups less trivial and reduces the bases for those cross-tabulations - e.g. if each respondent sees half the grids the average base for cross-tabs between a technique in one grid and another is just 25% of the total base.
So, please do continue to send us your suggestions by the end on Monday 27th, and we will launch the survey on Tuesday 28th.
We are hoping to be able to provide live updates to the results, which should make it more interesting for everybody.
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