Harmonisation in market research

Harmonisation is concerned with the common adoption of standard definitions, concepts, questions and outputs.

Within the commercial market research industry there are few universally adopted harmonisation standards. The best example is probably MRS Social Grade, which is very widely used.

Given the number of individual companies involved, it is likely to be impractical at present to develop further harmonised standards within the commercial research industry. However many other standards, with varying breadth of use, do exist.

These pages provide a short guide to which standards are available and links to their definitions. The most extensive set of existing standards in the UK comes from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) (www.ons.gov.uk), as a result of their ongoing initiative to harmonise questions and results across their own range of social surveys.

The adoption of existing harmonised approaches in commercial market research has the potential to:

• Increase quality, in that an existing standard may be constructed to a higher level of quality than would be practical for a new, ad-hoc design.
• Increase the scope for data fusion of survey results with other existing data.
• Allow research users to compare results from different exercises more easily, including benchmarking against ONS social surveys.
• Save money, in that some or all of the appropriate concepts, question wording, edit rules and output presentation may be readily available.

The adoption of any harmonised standards is entirely voluntary and a matter for agreement between research companies and their clients. There may equally be good reasons, such as consistency with past work, for not adopting standards listed here.

The focus in these pages is on surveys of the public, although some of the standards may be applicable to others surveys such as of businesses. Material not directly relevant to surveys of the public is presented on a separate page.

The primary set of harmonised standards

Harmonised standards of less direct relevance

These pages have been constructed by the MRS Census and Geodemographics Group.

Comments and suggestions for improvement and further material are welcomed, contact David Harris: dharris@caci.co.uk.