Modern Metrix

How Americans Spend their Money: Break-Down of Expenditures for Average US Household

NPR has interesting visualization that summarizes findings of Bureau of Labor Statistics from their most recent Consumer Expenditures Survey:

The article also looks at how American's spending habits changed over last several decades. In particular, compared to 1949 data, Americans nowadays spend considerably less money on food (15% in 2011 vs. 40% in 1949) and clothes (3.6% in 2011 vs. 11.7% in 1949), but more on housing (41% in 2011 vs. 26% in 1949) and transportation (16.9% in 2011 vs 7.3% in 1949). 

Update: here is an alternative visualization, with more expenditure categories. 

Using Consumer Data to Change their Shopping Habits

Fascinating article in NYT magazine on how companies use consumers' data to change and shape their shopping habits. 

"As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy."

Unfortunately, author makes it sound a bit too creepy and invasive. But yep, that's what we do.

Profiles of E-bay Users According to Hunch

Interesting infographic report from the "personalization graph" company Hunch that developed psychographic and behavioral profiles of e-bay users based on data from 70,000 respondents. Among the most interesting findings: e-bay users are more likely to be happy with their job , prefer impressionalism and surrealism when it comes to art, and read "The New Yorker". Non-users, on the other hand, are more likely to be unhappy with their jobs, prefer realism and romanticism, and are more likely to read "People" magazine. 

The Era of API

Interesting article in Digiday about how digital data is becoming increasingly open:

"Recent research by Mashery predicts that the volume of APIs powering mobile and Web apps will grow by 300 percent in the next two years. Gartner as well predicts that 75 percent of public companies will have open APIs by the end of 2013."

While the article focuses mostly on "creative" use of data by agencies, I believe that arrival of API era has even more implications for independent researchers and data journalists. I feel like it's time for me to start learning Python, Ruby or PHP!

Added on Feb. 3: more on openning private data to public, including concept of data philanthropy 

Surveillance Cameras as a Source for Consumer Research Data

Think Google Analytics for brick and mortar stores, using in-store surveillance cameras:

"Prism's software can count people that come into a business, measure the length of the line at checkout, and produce static or animated visualizations showing how people moved around a store. It is designed so that it cannot identify or track individuals. One national wireless carrier is already using Prism's technology to generate heat maps of where visitors go in their showrooms, to compare the level of interest in different devices—valuable data to them and to the device makers."

I personally believe that data collected this way is more reliable than when using mobile phones to log and track people's behavior inside the stores.

4.74 Degrees of Separation

Interesting article in NYTimes about most recent replication of Milgram's famous "small world experiment". The original research introduced concept "six degrees of separation" - that any two people in the world are separated by only six intermediate connections. According to Facebook scientists, who analyzed data on 721 million active Facebook users with total of 69 billion friendships, that number now is down to 4.74. Of course, I would question definition of "friendship" used in the study (it was defined simply as a being "friends" on Facebook), nevertheless, the methodology and analysis are interesting. 

More detailed report is available on Facebook Data page here.  

Googlers vs. Microsofties: Who Buys More Junk Food and Other Shopping Habits

RapLeaf looks at the shopping habits of Google and Microsoft employees in this fascinating study that utilizes Rapleaf's enormous database of identifiable information

Tell me what e-mail service do you use, and I will tell you your credit score?

Interesting post in TechCrunch on differences in average credit score across the users of different public e-mail services. Obviously, these differences are of socio-demographic and geo-demographic nature.

 

 

Statistics in Market Research: Common Pitfalls and Mistakes (Vovici)

Great post on Vovici blog on common mistakes that market researchers make when using and reporting various statistics.

SSI: Study of the Effects of Survey Length on Fatigue and Response Quality

The PDF report of the new study by SSI on the relationship between the length of online survey and the quality of responss is now available on Research Voice web site (free registration required). The major findings: 

• Survey length does not affect the response rates
• Most drop-outs occur in the middle of the interviews, and longer surveys do not necessarily have higher drop-out rates
• Repondents tend to speed up the responses and pay less attention to the questions as they get tired, and as a result, the longer surveys yield data of lower quality.