Reply #25: Bad scholarship [View All]

[Coastie for Truth]

To give this any effing credibility is typical of the racism of "some" self-styled Progressives and is exactly what Bernard Weiner () wrote about and had published in DU's Tuesday morning crisis papers.

To anyone who has gone beyond "Statistics for Dummies" or "Schaums Statistics" -- even GeoCartographia's web site is self serving double talk.

The GeoCartographia Research Institute

The GeoCartographia Research Institute, headed by Prof. Avi Degani and Dr. Rina Degani, an expert in the field of calculating the economic potential of products, undertakes special projects in a wide range of areas. The Institute combines research expertise with wide experience of performing field surveys, and is noted for its research work, high expertise with mathematical models, development of unique tools at an international level, and work with high-level organizations both in Israel and internationally. The Institute also specializes in performing surveys among the specific sectors of population found in Israel.

The market surveys and potential surveys carried out by the Institute include consumer goods, buyers, power centers, real-estate projects, and more. The Institute includes experts in the fields of marketing, economics, business management, statistics, mathematics, performance surveys, geography, information systems, social psychology, sociology, communications, education, urban planning and urban economics.

The Institute has four research departments, and a special survey department which serves all the other departments. This department, the "GeoCartographia Survey Institute," has over the years acquired a reputation for reliability and accuracy, both in economic/commercial and in political forecasting. The Institute's success is the result of its scientific development work in the areas of sampling and segmentation of target populations, a deep understanding of the various population sectors, and a great deal of experience in fields such as consumer behavior, as well as areas of importance socially and nationally.
------------------------------
A clean, unique research methodology

"When you try to find the leading product in the nation," explains Prof. Degani, who is an expert on research methods and socio-economic information strategy, "the best way is to look at the brand value of each product. The 'brand value' of a particular product is created in the public perception over the course of time, and it reflects the public's awareness of a number of key attributes of the product, such as reliability, ease of use, wearability, beauty, and so on, together with other aspects that have been used to form a person's view of the product, by advertising among other means."

Professor Avi Degani is a director of the GeoCartographia Institute, together with Dr. Rina Degani, who specializes in urban economics, market surveys, and calculations of potential. Even though the Institute has a great deal of experience with consumer goods, when they started to perform the surveys that would reveal which is "the best" product, according to the perception of the Israeli public, the directors of the Institute discovered that they would have to develop a unique research methodology in order to answer the question. To this end, Dr. Rina Degani developed a system in which each category is tested in two stages.

In the first stage, a survey is carried out among 500 interviewees, who are asked, in an open question, to give names of products, brands, companies, and services that they know, from among the categories surveyed. From the names they list, between three and seven brands in each category are identified as leading brands according to public opinion, on the basis of the feedback received.

In the second stage, a representative sample of between 500 and 1000 people are interviewed. They are asked to indicate, from among the products listed as "leading" by the people in the first stage, which product or service is "the best" in its category.

Each survey is performed on a representative, national sample of the adult Jewish population (aged 18 and over) in Israel. The interviews are carried out by phone, in the afternoon and evening, from the computerized interviewing center of GeoCartographia. Every category is surveyed using a sample of 1000 participants, which enables us to achieve a sampling error of 3% at a 95% significance level. "In this type of survey, which addresses the brand value of every product or service," explains Prof. Degani, "there is no need to pose concrete questions. We don't ask the people interviewed, 'why do you think it's the best product?' The brand value is a kind of product summary in the person's head, and it sums up all the objective and subjective factors, fixes his awareness of product preferences and their relative positions, and itself determines which of them he perceives to be 'the best'."

"The questions we asked for 'The Test of the Nation' were intended to retrieve, reveal and rank the 'brand value' of the various products, brands and services; and the cleanest possible way to do that is the two-stage method, when in the first stage we discover what brands the public thinks of when given a completely open and unaided query, and only later, after considering how frequently each product was mentioned, do we move to the second stage, which tries to rank the leading brands as specifically as possible. This is a completely clean research methodology, with no deviations."

Other methods used in the surveys include satisfaction surveys. In these we ask every interviewee to rank from 1 to 10 his level of satisfaction with a particular product that he owns. In this way we can discover which is the product that those who bought it and use it are most highly satisfied with.

Lately we have begun targeted surveys among subsectors of the population, such as: young people, mothers of babies, company decision-makers, and others.
-------------------------------------------
The surveys: research, methods, implementation

The GeoCartographia Institute, under the direction of Dr. Rina Degani and Professor Avi Degani, performs the surveys for "The Test of the Nation." The methodology developed by the Institute's directors for our first survey now has a proven track record, and was used this time too: every survey is performed as a national, representative sample of the adult Jewish population, and the aim is to establish, in each category, which product or service is perceived by this population to be "the best." "This time too, as in previous surveys," says Prof. Avi Degani, "we got very clean results from a research point of view."

I had Prof David S. McKinney and Professor Morris de Groot for two semesters of Statistics, and I am a "doc" -- and this is junk science -- as phony as "Intelligent Design" and the "Denial of Global Warming."