CSI: Research

A crime against research has been committed, and it's our job to find out who did it and how. Ever feel the results of a project were just too convenient? You were right. This workshop shows you how to detect fiddled results, confirmation bias, impossibly small error bars and outright cheating. Prizes awarded for the best research detectives!

In the past year, a number of scandals of scientific fraud have been uncovered in psychology and other fields, including fabricated data and dubious analysis techniques, among other things. Academic researchers are realising that their disciplines have a problem: studies with positive and surprising results are more likely to be published, which encourages scientists to distort research findings in order to advance their careers.

We started to wonder whether we, as market researchers, are any better than that. After all, we also feel the pressure to present positive and surprising results (aka insights), and so this could be something we as an industry need to look out for as well to avoid the same fate.

Naturally the MRS has its code of conduct, but the bigger issue with these debates is not always so much explicitly breaking the rules, but that many operate within their boundaries, using formally acceptable ways to manipulate the facts to be more amenable to the argument they want to present. The challenge is to preserve professional integrity when under huge pressure to take the easier way out.

The evening will take the form of a detective story: with audience members given all the clues they need to figure out whether the research results have been biased and what the real story is. The experience will be highly interactive and the audience will have a chance not just to gain new knowledge but to try out what they've just learned in a realistic (and fun) case study.

The event will show researchers how to avoid some of the temptations to selectively report data, how to communicate real insight to clients rather than just telling them what they want to hear, and show clients how to spot a debrief that's been manipulated.

Who should come

Any researcher - agency or client-side - and especially those involved in account management, debriefs or other aspects of the interface between agency and client. Anyone who cares about the integrity of research results and data.

Speakers

Leigh Caldwell and Elina Halonen run The Irrational Agency, a research agency which helps clients find out how to create value for consumers using behavioural economics and psychology. They carry out academic research in economics and psychology alongside their market research work, and regularly present that research at international psychology conferences. Elina won the IJMR Young Writer Award at the 2012 MRS awards, and Leigh is author of The Psychology Of Price, a book on using psychology to set pricing strategy.

Time:18.00-19.30 followed by drinks and networking

Venue

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