DialSmith, a US based market research company, have been recently publishing an interesting series of articles looking at our reliance on fundamentally flawed recall and memory based methods of gathering feedback.
This is (so far) a five part investigation covering:
- Why this is a problem: Memories get rewritten the whole time – they are be distorted and contaminated by both internal and external sources. expecting people to accurately answer a questionnaire about a past event is unrealistic – yet how often do we recognise the limitations of recall and memory based research methods?
- What is the problem: what issues does using recall and memory based research methods raise?
- What happens when it goes wrong: termed the ripple effect, what impact can questionable results have?
- How can we fix this: how can we address the issues and minimise the effects?
- Live highlights: highlights from a live panel of experts including how we can capitalise on memory manipulationa nd potentially use it as a technique
There may be more installments to come – but an interesting debate. Click here to read the full suite of reports.