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I know I shouldn’t let it get to me, but there’s just a faint hint of a rant bubbling under the surface. It happens whenever a new report crosses my desk with a title something like “public attitudes to green issues”. The report tells us nothing about public attitudes to green issues, but a lot about the way we do market research. In a previous life, I was a market researcher (yes I know but I was young, I needed the money) and one of the things you learn is how to write questionnaires. It’s not rocket science but it seems to be a lost art. One of the basic principles of designing questionnaires is that you have to ensure questions are neutral – it doesn’t matter to the respondent whether they answer A or B except that one of them happens to be true. The hilarious example often used by trainers to illustrate the point was this. How would you ask the question to ascertain how many people have murdered their wife? Is it straight – “have you murdered your wife (recently)? Yes / No (delete as appropriate). Probably lead to a bit of underclaim. Or should you slide the desired response surreptitiously into a list of other possible responses? “Which of the following have you done recently? ~ Moved house? ~ Changed your bank account? ~ Murdered your wife? ~ Taken an intercontinental flight? Note - we put the test response in the middle to minimise any order-effects. Or maybe you would try to defuse it a bit more explicitly – “I see many people are murdering their wife these days, have you, by any chance murdered yours? Hmmm. As you can imagine, market research training is low on jokes so this sort of thing goes down well. I think you know where I’m going with this. When we ask people questions about green issues, there’s a good chance that answer A will make them appear a model citizen, selfless, enlightened and generally admirable, while answer B will put them in the box marked “Public enemy no.1”. Hmm, which answer do I give? And that is why research tells us people are flying less while passenger numbers are steadily rising. And why the report that is now open on my desk says the proportion of adults who aren’t convinced by climate change is less than ten percent, but the report I’ve just filed away says it’s nearly half.
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