ISO 20252

Raison d’Être for ISO 20252

Market, opinion, and social research has increasingly become a global industry. The number of projects aiming at comparisons across countries, regions, and cultures is increasing and so are the demands for high-quality data that can accomplish this. Standardization of certain processes can help in this endeavor if properly implemented.

This expanding industry needs various elements of control to make sure that service providers in different countries work in similar ways and that they perform certain activities and adhere to core values that will generate high quality. ISO 20252 is also supposed to help users and clients to assess the service provider.

ISO 20252 is developed so that it should sustain a number of years. New methods and techniques are applied on a continuing basis and therefore the standard is in principle free from guidance on methods and technologies. The standard should be applicable no matter what infrastructures are in place at various service providers.

The standard was developed by a worldwide group of professionals working within market and social research as well as official statistics. Standards have been available in many different [Page 886]organizations and fields such as the Code of Practice within the European Statistical System, European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research’s guidelines, and the U.S. Office of Management and Budget’s survey guidelines. ISO 20252 is the first global standard for survey and market research. All these standards overlap to some extent.

The Requirements

There are around 400 requirements in the standard, and the focus is on the statistics production process. The requirements cover all steps that are known to have a large impact on data quality or cost, such as sample design, questionnaire design, data collection, competence and training, monitoring of interviewers, the use of validation methods, and presentation of research results. The standard specifies what the organization should do but not how. For example, one requirement is that if the client or the service provider deems it necessary to test a questionnaire, then a pretest of the questionnaire should be carried out. The standard does not, however, specify how to test the questionnaire or which method to use.

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