Harris Interactive provides innovative research, insights and strategic advice to help our clients so they can make decisions with clarity and confidence that ultimately lead to measurable and enduring improvements in their performance. We are most widely known for The Harris Poll, one of the longest running, independent opinion polls in the United States, and for pioneering online market research methods. As the pioneer we are proud to have created the Harris Poll Online—what we believe to be the world’s largest panel of survey respondents, made up of over six million double opt-in panelists.

Quantitative Data Collection Modes

As a true full service research provider, we are well versed in online, traditional and mixed-mode data collection approaches as well as today’s leading qualitative approaches. Even given our advantages in the online data collection space, you can be confident that Harris Interactive will recommend online data collection only when it is deemed viable and appropriate.

Our clients appreciate the spectrum of data collection options we provide to them. In fact, we have and continue to conduct telephone research in over 90 countries worldwide. In fiscal year 2006, telephone research made up 40% of our revenue. Although many clients are progressing to online and mixed modes, we continue to meet our clients’ telephone needs by contracting with select approved telephone centers as well as by using our own telephone centers.

Brentford, United Kingdom

• 180 Internet-enabled CATI stations
• Bi-lingual capabilities; can interview in native language across Western and most of Eastern Europe
• Additional 800-person-strong field force available when necessary

Given the increasing Internet penetration across the globe, as of March 2007, we had conducted research online for our clients in more than 80 countries.

Our online survey infrastructure can send out more than one million email invitations per hour and simultaneously process 180,000 five-minute inbound surveys per hour, or what is the equivalent of 15,000 surveys. Since 1997, we have completed more than 70 million online surveys in over 32 tested and approved languages.

While some online data collection providers tout a variety of seemingly impressive stats, our main priority is to ensure the highest level of data quality possible. Our strategy for ensuring the representativeness of your data collected online is to reduce total error. When it comes to online and mixed mode data collection, our research-on-(online) research findings influence all aspects of data collection where error can occur. The three main areas we systematically attend to in every project span from sampling and survey design through to weighting.

Harris Interactive leads the research community in thinking beyond the online survey to consider the abundant array of data collection options available, such as

• combining telephone interviews with online data entry (web-assisted personal interviewing [WAPI]),
• online recruitment to offline surveys (and vice-versa),
• online focus groups and in-depth interviews, and
• roving laptop-based interviews using computer-assisted personal interviews.

When commissioning mixed-mode, international and multinational work with Harris Interactive, our heritage in telephone and other traditional modalities coupled with our pioneering leadership in the online research space have enabled us to build a single research operations platform. This platform spans across all our owned and contracted telephone centers streamlining our online and telephone data collection into a robust global research platform we refer to as Integrated CATI WAPI (ICW).