Stanley Cohen, president of Pulse Analytics, Inc. since 1979, has worked in market research, statistics and computers for 23 years. Cohen has also worked for IBM, IT&T and Benton and Bowles Advertising Agency. He received his masters in mathematics from Yeshiva University, New York, and studied operations research at New York University. Additionally, Cohen has published many articles on marketing research statistics and is an early pioneer of multi-variate analysis to marketing research problems.

Your data is ready. After weeks of planning the research strategy, fulfilling the sample quotas, collecting the  questionnaires, editing and coding the items, and finally deciding on the analytical approaches that are to be taken, you are ready to "start" to work.

You lapse into a momentary reverie and remember how it used to be. You had to coordinate the individual tasks of tabulation of data, statistical analysis, graphic presentations, and report preparation among a variety of service facilities where skills and resources were concentrated among a limited number of specialists. The specter of a scratched-over project flow charts and time-tables arises, covered by a veil of deadline extensions, bridging gaps of unforeseen bottlenecks that have eaten up the conservatively planned slack, and have forced you into frenzied overtime that will ensure that the final report will be issued fresh and forthcoming on the scheduled due date.

All that is changed now. Your PC computer, compatible and charged up with all the options and features that you need is at your service. You have all the memory (RAM that is) you can get, you have a generously endowed hard disk (more than 10 megabytes), a dot matrix and/or laser printer; a graphics monitor; even a math-coprocessor; and finally a modem that breaks the isolation of your office out into the world of data communication. The specialists are a figment of the past. Careful investigation and planning has provided you with a portfolio of market research software that are highly recommended for their quality and facilitation of use, that are adequately sophisticated, and that will cover all the bases required to get the job done. You now begin to work.

PC growth

The scenario being described is one that has grown throughout the entire business spectrum, and is fully represented in the microcosm of the market research industry. The "you" in the scenario are the people, departments, and even whole companies that have been assimilated into the mainstream of PC growth. Software programs and packages, developed by independent and separate producers, have been and continue to be designed to communicate with each other. Above all the software is directly usable by the market research professional and the task network can be traversed without the assistance of a computer science specialist.

Your data is on a disk file on your PC. You had the option of using one of the programs designed for expedient direct data entry into the PC. SPSS-Data Entry, Lotus 1-2-3, or Reflex would have been adequate for this size project in which the number of items and respondents were not overwhelming.

Although you are confident in the quality of the data entry process, you want to check it anyhow, and make any minor corrections and adjustments that may be necessary. Most of the data entry programs provide a fast-moving, easy-to-use program data editor. In addition the Norton Editor will do a fine job. In any case, the data will be displayed on the screen and you will breeze through making the necessary adjustments. On-line editing via cursor control as well as a number of editing function key combinations are standard fare in the editing function. The data, the key to all the research, is now ready.

Steps in analysis

The analysis of the data follows. You want the results of the analytical procedures to be saved on disk files. In general, now you are going to integrate the analytical results into the main body of your report and you will need access to the output files. Some of these results will be printed in their entirety, but for many of them you will be cutting, pasting, and editing to accommodate the format and flow of your report. All of the analytical programs in your portfolio have the option to save the output on disk files (in the required ASCII format).

Tabulation

The next step is that of tabulation and cross-tabulation. The programs SPSS-Tables and Surveytab will give you the facility of producing custom-made tables with full annotation for titles, banners and stubs. They will also provide for flexible column, row, and table percentaging. The features of weighting and filtering are also included.

You have selected the SPSS/PC as the mainstay of your statistical capability. It provides a very wide range of statistical processes, covering, basic statistics, crosstabs (with significance testing), regression analysis, non-parametrics, very broad spectrum of univariate and multivariate ANOVAs, and factor and discriminant function analyses. The virtues of this program over some of the others available include: flexible labeling and annotated outputs; on-line editing of data, out-put, and procedure files; in-line data transformations; and inter-procedure communication allowing for output of one process to flow smoothly as input into the next. The well-written manuals guide you through the procedures, and training seminars are widely available.

You are looking for deeper insights into your data, and have the additional experience with more sophisticated concepts. On this project you are also considering doing perceptual mapping,  perhaps an AID analysis, or a correspondence analysis for which you will be using the MDS-PC package of special purpose programs. PULSE/MPC will provide you with the ability to analyze multiple paired-comparisons. The final touch to your analytical plan is the procedure needed to gain a perspective into the perceptually homogeneous segments of your market, for which you will use the Pulse/QSEG.

Charts important

Pie, bar, or line charts are pictures worth how many words? In an instant the data is understood in the perspective of the question being posed. Chartmaster will generate these charts with the full facilities of scaling, editing, regressing, and titling options. While the program is accessible on its own, SPSS/PC has a special interface for generating and saving charts during analytical processing.

You have finally finished all the analyses and are ready to put together the report. All the tables, charts, and analytical results are on disk files, ready to be called upon when needed. Your main tool for this task is your word processor. One of the many that are highly recommended and that you have selected is Wordstar/2000. Its range of options gives you the flexibility you need, while at the same time being very user-friendly.

You will now begin to type a draft copy of your report. While you are typing you will also be editing and revising the text of your report. At any point you will retrieve any required analysis file and place it into the desired place in the text. You will cut, paste, and edit those files so that the pieces of the analysis are appropriate to the flow of the report. Similarly, your graphics will be retrieved by Inset which will be placed in line with the text. This ingenious graphics editor is used as an integrating utility to your graphics will be retrieved by Inset-2 which will be placed in line with the text. This ingenious graphics edi-reorient, and overlay the graphic material required for your presentation.

At long last, the report is written. As a final step, you will reread your draft copy and resubmit it to the word processor. A last editing pass through the copy and your final report is ready for printing.
Take a deep breath, and relax. There is another project waiting to get started.