Starting out

Hello:

As many of you might already know, I was laid off in March of 2009. And, I have to look for a job or project work.

But, I do have extra time, so I am adding skills to make myself more appealing, and to better serve my clients or new employer.

I have been conducting qualitative market research for the past 25 years - thousands upon thousand of interviews, hundreds of focus groups, and some secondary searches, even competitive intelligence.

See the gap? I do. I need to know how to do surveys and analyze the results.

How am I doing this? Bootstraps - by my bootstraps. That's not entirely true. I did sign up to take a class given by the Burke Institute which I'll take in June of this year.

That's still a while away, so I have figured out some ways to get going before my class.

1) I have volunteered for the Maryland Film Festival (May 8 - 10 in Baltimore, Charles Theater and other locations) and I found out they are doing intercept interviews the whole time. Turns out I will be training some interviewers and, if I'm lucky, I'll meet with the marketing research firm that is performing the analysis. They're looking for an N of 1000+

2) Volunteer to do a survey for my gym. About being green - I saw women using 6 or 7 towels to shower and wash hair - sheesh. I'm going to write a draft, show it to management at the gym, edit, do a pretest (not more than 15 mins) and then load it onto survey monkey or zapdata or some other free survey softwaew

3) Read articles on quantitative methods - data collection and analysis. I'm going to stick with quirks for now, but wil migrate to the Marketing Research Association, I'm sure

I do have other interests in marketing research - ethnography and human factors.

Wish me luck.