What is Field and tab?

A wiki formatted definition, as I write it, is:

'''Field and tab''' refers to a limited set of services provided in the [[marketing research]] industry. The name refers to the task of '''''field'''ing'' a questionnaire (that is, interviewing consumers or whomever is the target market, to get their response data to an array of questions), then '''''tab'''ulating'' the resulting data into convenient two-dimensional tables (called "cross-tabulations"), based on answers to at least two of the questions included in a survey.





{| border="1"
|+ An example of a '''cross-tabulation''' (simple)
! Answer choices !! All Respondents !! Males !! Female
|-
! Voted for Democrat
| 55% || 50% || 60%
|-
! Voted for Republican
|45%
|50%
|40%
|}



A field and tab research vendor will typically not be responsible for drafting a questionnaire or assisting on high-level sampling design discussions. Likewise, after the data has been collected and tabulated, the vendor will typically not interpret the resulting data nor prepare a deck of presentation slides. These responsibilities fall on the client (the research buyer) or on a [[consulting|consultant]] that the client may hire.

Field and tab is always a part of the offering of a [[full service research]] vendor. A full-service firm will sometimes offer only their field and tab component when the budget for a particular study is limited.

==Bibliography==
* Hague, Paul N., '''Market research: a guide to planning, methodology & evaluation''' (3rd edition), Kogan Page publisher, 2002.

[[Category:Research methods]]

Note: The content published above is released to the public by Gregory Kohs, under the terms of the Creative Commons, Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. All respectable attempt should be made to attribute the original content to Gregory Kohs.