Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing

For many outside of our industry, Market Research has always been a fuzzy concept, and let's face it, a weird choice of career.

But no longer! A major Hollywood movie (Last Chance Harvey) features a market researcher as a main character.



But what is she doing with pen and paper? What an antiquated approach! We would expect her to be using a computer assisted personal interviewing system or some kind of PDA survey software, of course. Where are these movie script writers doing their research?

Legal Note: This post in no way confirms that my wife convinced me to watch a movie which could be described as a Romance Drama.

Mobile surveys might be the hottest topic in market research today -- and I've been waiting a long time to say that!

Since I developed my first survey software for Mobile Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing (MCAPI) in 1991, I've been waiting for mobile research to hit the mainstream. From bleeding edge to leading edge, mobile surveys have always been viewed as an "opportunity of the future". If PDA surveys generated a bit of a wave back in the late 1990's, then Internet surveys were surely a tsunami... and now it's the marriage of mobility and high-speed wireless Internet access that is opening a whole new word of possibilities.

I had an opportunity to speak at the Mobile Research Conference in London last month. It was billed as the first ever conference dedicated to mobile research, and it was a very promising sign for this niche that Techneos has been working to fill for more than a decade. (In fact, it was at least the second such conference, as I also presented at the Association for Survey Computing conference on Mobile Computing in 2005).

While Techneos has been proving for many years that you CAN do serious research on a handheld computer, a much bigger opportunity for mobile surveys is emerging -- at long last! Ranging from photo diaries to mystery shopping to funky new ways to conduct customer satisfaction questionnaires--and lest we forget the good old face-to-face interview--surveys on mobile phones, Netbooks and other mobile devices will no doubt play a major role in the future of market research.

Hold onto your hats and join us for the ride! We're looking forward to the future that we first envisioned almost 20 years ago. Yikes, how time flies!