‘Is a woman who eats biscuits and chocolate, drinks alcohol, and smokes more likely to feel out of place in an art gallery if she lives in Vale Royal than a man who eats five pieces of fruit a day, doesn't smoke, drinks regularly, has given up sport due to other commitments and lives in Preston?'

The bottom line (apart from the fact that we can tell you the answer) is, in all honesty, who cares?

Numbers can be both highly informative and entirely misleading: At one end of the scale there is 42 - the single number, the ultimate answer to ‘the great question of life, the universe, and everything‘ in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Knowing the answer is 42 is, of course, of little or no value (to Loonquawl and Phouchg) as, in itself, it is meaningless. What they did not realise was the importance of asking the right question rather than seeking definite answers; in many cases the real value lies in the journey and understanding data rather than in coming up with an answer.

The James Stewart 1947 movie Magic Town is based on the ‘new science' of public opinion polling. His character; 'Rip' Smith finds a town whose citizens' views are a perfect reflection of those of the United States as a whole. However, just when his plan to use its residents as his market research short cut to the perfect answer they start to provide responses that they think are more meaningful rather than just straightforward truth. As the saying goes - many a true word is said in jest' - Citizen's panels, keeping ‘tame registers' for interviews etc. you may recognise the problem.

Collecting the numbers is one thing, making sense of them is another. At one extreme we have agencies deciding that they need evidence to prove something but not sure what they need; colleagues want to ask interesting questions and, often because the money has to be spent - it is all needed yesterday! This is often followed by a rush to organise a survey and collect lots of data - the premise being that ‘if there is a lot - it must be good and lots of data must produce something worth knowing. Unfortunately this can result in going from a starvation diet to drowning in the stuff.

So: what is the point of all of the above?

It is that it is vital to try to ask questions designed to elicit useful and informative answers and to avoid drowning in data. At KKP we try (not always successfully) to persuade clients to ask fewer of the right questions. For many clients, the most useful approach is to focus upon obtaining a small amount of quality data from a large number of people; this approach provides a really sound basis to build upon. Wherever possible, results are structured and displayed in graphs or maps.

Although thorough understanding is important and time series data is essential to understand trends, the key message is not to get lost in the data. It is of no value if the analysis is perfect but arrives too late to be used. The ideal is to build on data that are:

• Focused - key information, baseline, to the point etc.
• Accurate - precise and statistically valid.
• Current - up to date, allowing quick turn round, live monitoring systems etc.
• Thin - short questionnaires, carefully refined data on a large number of people. 
• Starts a process that can easily be enhanced via interviews, focus groups, time series etc. to paint an accurate picture of what it means.

As a research agency, our role is to use information to tell a story, to prompt the next question, to provoke debate and to establish systems that let you test ideas and policy rather than asking a question once every blue moon and never going back to it.

The bottom line is that your research must have a purpose; to prove/disprove a point, to assess whether what you are doing is having an impact (short, medium or long term), or to evaluate the effectiveness or relevance of a particular programme, message or intervention. Key to its value is the mandate to justify ongoing investment or remedial action and the defensibility of the findings in the environment in which they are to be used.

For more information or to discuss this topic further, please contact Peter Millward (peter.millward@kkp.co.uk)