I wrote a piece for @Greenbook on a common research dilemma: what to do when cross-cultural fieldwork clashes with holiday seasons. We’ve all heard the usual advice: pause, delay, avoid. But in a world where people are online 24/7, does that still stack up?

Ever found yourself in a research debrief, thinking, “So what?” You're not alone. And it’s probably not because the data was bad, but because the research was designed forwards rather than backwards.

The backwards approach in market research isn’t new, but it's still surprisingly rare in practice. The central idea is simple: instead of starting with questions, start with the decisions.

If you've ever wrestled with a bloated questionnaire, or had that moment of realisation that your data doesn't actually answer the questions your stakeholders care about, this one's for you.

Yesterday, the sky was that shade of grey that is typical for London: not quite threatening rain, but not offering sunshine either. And yet, there were little moment of joy: casually running into my neighbour’s dog Peanut, the perfect song shuffling onto my playlist, a message from an old friend that made me smile.

For 84% of us, it is important to find little moments of joy. So I dug into YouScan’s social listening data to understand how micro joy manifests in our daily conversations.

The menopause technology market is projected to reach $60 billion by 2027. Despite this:

• Only 27% of pre-menopausal women understand perimenopause

• Half of post-menopausal women still consider menopause a taboo topic

• Female-founded femtech start-ups raise less than half the funding of male-led companies

While current tech solutions focus primarily on symptoms like hot flushes, there is potential for more inclusive approaches that support the spectrum of menopausal experiences.

Explore my YouScan dashboard to see around which topics the menopause tech conversation clusters.

Do numbers bias our decision-making? This is the question explored in the article "Does Counting Change What Counts? Quantification Fixation Biases Decision-Making". Their study examines quantification fixation, a bias where people give undue weight to numerical information over qualitative data in decisions, even when the qualitative aspects are equally or more important.

Survey tools like SurveyMonkey or Typeform make research easier and more accessible for everyone. Whether you work with a self-service platform, or an established research provider, there are points of failure in any survey. Often they are only found when looking at the data. At this point, it is too late to fix them and re-fielding will be required, which impacts your budgets and timings.

Here are the top 3 data collection errors a researcher can encounter and how to avoid them.