4 (More!) Kinds of Market Research Bias and How to Avoid Them

Oh, hi there. Glad you could make it. Welcome back to our two-part series exploring eight kinds of bias that can affect your market research design as well as your respondents. If you haven’t already, you should definitely check out part one. Right now. I’ll wait.

Awesome, now that you’re all caught up, let’s dive into the final four of market research biases, how they impact your results, and what you can do about them.

5. Self-Selection Bias

What it is: In statistics, self-selection bias arises in any situation in which respondents select themselves by volunteering to join a study—as opposed to being individually chosen by the researcher. In market research, the resulting sample is then over-representative of those who already have strong connections to your stimulus.

How to avoid it: Self-selection is a huge problem in online market surveys. If you ask someone already on your ecommerce site to review their site experience, those who take the survey are inherently more likely to be website visitors, shop online, etc. Conducting your research with an unbiased partner will help ensure you recruit a true representation of your target audience.

6. Wording Bias

What it is: Not exactly a bias in and of itself, but elaborating on a respondent’s answer for them puts words in their mouth and distorts your results. Researchers do this because they are trying to confirm a hypothesis, build rapport, or overestimate their understanding of a respondent. A similar pitfall is known as the “framing effect,” which dictates that respondents will react to a given choice in different ways depending on how it is presented.

How to avoid it: Sound discussion guide design and candid moderation are critical to effective, unbiased qualitative research. Around here, we’re extremely cognizant of avoiding leading questions or biasing respondents with loaded wording, and our moderators are trained to probe using respondents’ language, not their own. Never sacrifice precision for convenience, and partner with a skilled researcher to compose an impartial guide if need be. Read this article for more tips on effective discussion guide writing.

7. Memorable Response Bias

What it is: This one’s pretty self-explanatory. It happens when you only focus on the super awesome, super obnoxious, or super negative responses to your research.

How to avoid it: Besides telling yourself to consciously weigh all respondents equally, you should design your deliverable in a way that presents a variety of responses and results in order to draw informed conclusions. If you are conducting research, your deliverable should present an assortment of consumer insights, implications, and verbatim responses to ensure that all respondents are represented. Your study design and methodology should give all respondents a chance to respond, not just the assertive or opinionated ones.

8. Knowledge Bias

What it is: Kind of unique to product testing, this bias is based in the tendency to choose the best-known or familiar option over the objectively better one.

How to avoid it: We’re all pretty much hardwired to avoid risk, so it’s not that crazy for people to choose the recognizable over the new, even if the new is obviously better. To counteract this bias, researchers should probe into respondents’ motivations behind likelihood to buy or switch brands. This will address any apathy that consumers’ knowledge bias may create.

And there you have it!

While a world without bias is kind of impossible, being aware of the factors that bias your market research from both ends of the process is essential to harvesting actionable data. Hopefully now you feel armed and ready to take down these sneaky biases before they infiltrate your research. To see how our focus on research expertise and execution allows us to deliver speedy insights to our clients, even when it comes to unplanned questions they need answers for quickly, take a look at this case study.