Establishing international standards for measuring demographics: A paper exploring the best ways to measure basic demographics

Jon Puleston

Kantar Profiles, the data and insight agency, explored the best ways to measure basic demographics in the UK.

Introduction

In this paper, I want to explore the best ways of measuring basic demographics (age, gender, education, income, working status, job and socio-economic classifiers), based on two years of exploratory research-on-research, comparing different methods used around the world and testing new techniques.

These demographic questions, asked in-survey, are the bedrock of market research. We rely on them to target audiences, set quotas, purchase sample and ensure our research is representative. There are, however, no international standards for asking them and few established best practice. Everyone has been left to their own devices, with methods varying dramatically from one market...

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