I’ve been speaking to many research professionals recently who are interested in checking out generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, but who are hesitant to do so because they don’t have a guide to help them through it. So, I’m here to help!
Since not everyone has time to watch my longer videos, I’m also creating a series of shorter ones that are focused on specific tasks. Here’s the third in the series:
Script:
Hey folks, Sean Jordan from the Research & Planning Group here. And I’m going to take a couple of minutes to show you how to use ChatGPT to create a quick survey that you can use to collect data or which you can even use as a screener for qualitative research projects like focus groups. This can save a lot of time if you’re a marketing research or insights professional, but the key is starting with good, strong research objectives and a strong research purpose statement to guide your process along.
Let’s say, though, I need to create a simple brand awareness survey for a soft drink brand with a sample of Midwestern consumers aged 25-65 from a research panel or a provided email list. Let’s also say that my client needs it turned around so quickly that I need to get a good first draft over by EOD, or end of day, so we can get revisions in place and get it launched quickly. This is a great time to use generative AI to help us achieve that goal.
Generally speaking, my survey needs to include four basic sections: a screener to ensure I’m getting the right people to participate, a block of brand awareness questions, a block of brand attribute questions and, if I’m being conventional, some demographic or profiling data. We’ll treat those four sections as our research objectives, and say the purpose of the study is to gauge how well the brand Fizzypop compares against other popular soft drink brands.
So, I enter a prompt like this:
Please create a survey with consumers from the Midwest who are aged 25-65 to gauge their overall awareness of the soft drink brand Fizzypop versus the top 20 most popular soft drink brands available. The survey should have a screener block that ensures that consumers live in the Midwestern region by inputting their ZIP code (terminate if not listed) and that they are in the appropriate age range.
The second block of questions should measure unaided brand awareness for their top of mind choice for a soft drink as well as any other choices they may make. It should also include an aided awareness section with Fizzypop and the top 20 brands.
The third block of questions should measure the key attributes of soft drinks for Fizzypop and up to three randomly-selected brands with which the participant has indicated a high level of familiarity.
The final block of questions should measure conventional demographics and profiling information including how often the respondent consumes soft drinks as well as the respondent’s gender, education level, marital status, size of household, number of children at home, educational level and favorite hobbies. All of these questions should be closed-ended.
What ChatGPT writes up from this prompt is a pretty decent survey that I can use as a starting point for a draft. I may want to change some things – I really don’t like telling participants they need to be from a certain region, for example, because it encourages fraud – but just by starting with this draft, I’ve probably saved myself at least an hour or two of initial survey development time, and it’s hitting most of the major points I would have hit in my own design. My need for speed is met, and I can move on to revising this into a really clean first draft.
I can use a very similar process to develop a focus group screener. Let’s say we’re conducting a series of focus groups for the same client. Here’s a prompt I can write to have ChatGPT write a screener for me.
I want to write a screener survey for a digital focus group study that’s being conducted with adults in the Midwestern region aged 25-65. Do not tell participants that they must live in the Midwest. Please indicate where responses will terminate and include a termination script.
We will recruit 8 participants per group. I want 30-40% of the sample to be male and 60-70% to be female. We do not want anyone who lives outside of the Midwestern region, which includes Illinois , Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin. We only want people who have a basic level of familiarity with Fizzypop, but the screener should also ask about their familiarity with Coke, Pepsi, Dr Pepper and RC Cola. We will pay all qualified participants $150 for being a part of the focus group, which takes place on April 1, 2024.
The screener that ChatGPT generated is pretty good. Again, it needs some tweaking, but what would have probably taken me at least a half an hour to create by hand with a pre-existing template or maybe even an hour from scratch now will take me just a few minutes to polish up and send off to my recruiter for evaluation. If I provided ChatGPT with a previous template after my prompt, I’d get an even better output I could use.
Whether I’m writing a survey or a screener, I want you to notice I’m being very specific about what I want in the prompts and outlining the structure of the document I want ChatGPT to return. The program can work from very general instructions, but the more precision and detail you provide, the better the output. And as always, I’m never just going to copy and paste something I generated in an AI program and send it to a client; I’m going to use it as a starting point to save myself some time and then spend some time tailoring it to suit my style and reflect my expertise as a research professional.
I hope you found this to be a useful tip! Please remember that my ethical guideline is to let people know if you’re using AI to author something, even if it’s just generating a starting point for your own work. Remember too, to be careful what you upload directly into ChatGPT and always disguise anything sensitive. If you enjoyed this, be sure to share it with someone else who can use it and also hit the like button, subscribe to my channel and leave a comment to share some of your fun tips for using ChatGPT!
See you next time!