Demographic Best Practice Recommendation - Age

ESOMAR’s new recommendation, founded on evidence-based best practice, is designed to improve quality standards and produce results that are more comparable from one project/region to another, thus facilitating multi-country research projects.

Age: The new ESOMAR Demographic Best Practice Recommendations for multi-country work

ESOMAR has developed a recommendation on how to ask the age question in a way that is comparable from project to project and is also good practice from a privacy point of view and more considerate of participants. The question should lead to more accurate information, lower participant drop-out and less privacy exposure for suppliers and clients. 

The process of describing and defining populations is currently very varied. Methods differ from one research company to the next, measures go quickly out of date, and research respondents don’t always give a proper answer to some demographic questions, which results in poor-quality data.

For instance, when asked their age, “How old are you?” or “What is your age?” some people give the wrong answer as they might wish to appear younger, or they don’t want to scroll down lots of years to come to their year of birth. Other people might not like being asked a question they have already been asked when signing up for a panel. Plus, many clients use different age bands, depending on the segment in which they are interested. All this leads to inconsistencies which create barriers in the exchange of international data making it difficult to compare the results of data from one country or one study to another.

ESOMAR’s new recommendation, founded on evidence-based best practice, is designed to improve quality standards and produce results that are more comparable from one project/region to another, thus facilitating multi-country research projects. With growing levels of international market research, this will help researchers and clients everywhere to improve research standards.

Who's working on it?
An introduction to the expert project team

If you work in a client company and would like to participate in this Sounding Board, please contact professional.standards@esomar.org.