Over our 10 years in business, we have developed best practices to ensure that our research reflects the diversity in our world. Today, more than ever, we think it’s critical to proactively address diversity issues in research. Here are the Top 6 things that we approach Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in market research.
We prioritize including questions that allow us to address potential points of discrimination in all forms, both for study recruitment and for analysis.
Some of the broader, more exhaustive points of diversity we measure include:
Skin tone
Sexuality
Gender identity
Religion
Health conditions
Physical ability
Political affiliation/ideology
Income/Class
Acculturation (Immigrant vs. Citizen)
Life stage
Education level
Location (urban vs. suburban vs. rural)
The way that people identify themselves and others changes over time and research needs to reframe questions and answer sets to reflect these changes.
We critique and subsequently reframe questions by:
Challenging commonly-accepted spectrums like gender and sexuality
Dimensionalizing less clear-cut questions, like relationship status (“My partner, not my husband”) and political ideology (“I’m not Conservative with a capital c, but I have conservative values”)
Levering guidelines established by experts & revisiting these regularly (e.g. Human rights organizations, Census Bureau, Academic resources)
‘Safe space’ is not just a buzzword. Avoiding ‘political correctness’ is not a simple task. When it comes to sensitive topics or polarizing issues, it’s genuinely difficult for some to share their views, particularly with strangers.
We encourage candid participation with tough topics by creating:
Emotionally safe spaces
Physically safe spaces
We plan ahead when it comes to fielding quantitative surveys so that we have an all-up, representative Gen Pop sample as well as the capability to analyze the data by a variety of diversity-minded demographics.
We protect against bias in field design by:
Starting with a (very) large base size
Strategically targeting augments
We treat people with the respect they deserve as feeling and thinking beings, not as test subjects. We demonstrate empathy-driven transparency by:
Giving people some visibility into a study’s subject and objectives
Offering a judgement-free way for people to opt-out if uncomfortable
Encouraging moderators to share personal information to create points of connection
We humbly acknowledge that our practices today to address diversity, equity, and inclusion in research needs constant attention to keep up with the world’s blistering pace.
We challenge research norms, including our very own new practices by:
Consulting culture experts and thought leaders
Learning from larger players in market research
Having honest conversations with our clients
Getting frontline intelligence from recruiters, focus group facilities, sample suppliers, and others
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