Frank Ovaitt, President and CEO of the Institute for Public Relations recently wrote a blog on Spotting Bad Research in response to a request from Institute Trustee Maril MacDonald. You can find that blog here. Frank quotes a number of the Institute’s Research Fellows and a number of folks (including me) commented on the post as well.

I believe the most important point the collective experts made was that for the research to be good, the process had to be transparent. That is, the researchers need to be clear about how they gathered the data and how they processed it. There should be no black boxes and no unanswered questions.

And, if you plan to use the results of the research for anything important, you should question everything you can think of from how the sample was drawn to how the questionnaire was designed to how the data was analyzed to how and why the recommendations were made.