The UK’s Office for National Statistics has been rebuilding its Labour Force Survey since at least 2023. Its August 2026 update names November 2027 as the most likely switch date. Until then, the old and new surveys run side by…
When Pew Research Center moved its long-running trend questions from phone to online, “don’t know” and other unprompted answers on one question fell from 10% to 1%. Same question, same month, different setup. Pew’s own analysis put the gap down…
A tracker migration means moving a tracking study—the survey you run wave after wave with the same questions—from one survey platform to another. The questions are the easy part. They’re like the sofa when you move house: big, obvious, and…
Office workers spend 4 hours and 38 minutes a week redoing work that’s already been done. That’s the global average from Asana’s Anatomy of Work study of more than 10,000 workers. In quant ops, that rework has a more familiar…
Most survey errors are born in the same place, and that’s good news. One place is much easier to watch than five. A survey error usually starts in the questionnaire, long before anyone writes code, and it gets more expensive…
Good news first: survey programming errors are rarely original. The same mistakes turn up study after study, on every platform. That makes them predictable, and anything predictable can be checked the same way every time. The ones that slip past…
Hospitals cut medical errors by 23% without asking anyone to work harder. 12 years ago. They changed how one shift hands patients to the next. Tracker teams can borrow the same idea, and most of them already keep the document…
A good tracker is the most valuable dataset a client owns. It lets Wave 7 sit next to Wave 1 and mean the same thing. Most trackers that lose that ability never had a meeting about it. That’s the frustrating…
Most fieldwork errors are older than fieldwork. They’re written into the questionnaire on Day 1, then carried through scripting, translation and testing until real respondents find them. By Day 3, fixing one costs data, budget and a client conversation. On…
Questionnaire errors cost about five minutes to fix in October. Someone spots a broken skip, edits the Word doc, and moves on. Find the same error in November, after scripting, translation and a soft launch, and it can cost a…
