Alex Rodriguez interviews Sam Surveyor about market research, public health, customer feedback, employee engagement, and the measures behind them. The show is live rather than recorded: you can listen, then ask a question and hear it discussed on air.
Listen to Survey Radio17 subjects, each a problem researchers run into and what a conversation can do about it.
For younger adults, family planning has become entangled with housing, unstable career paths, and how they read the future. These are hard to separate with a tick-box.
Many countries are crossing into super-aged territory. That forces questions about retirement age, automation, and workplaces spanning four generations at once.
Longer lives mean longer care. Much of that care is informal and unpaid, which makes it nearly invisible in official statistics.
The attention goes to people crossing borders. Researchers are just as concerned with trapped populations — those who cannot afford to leave a place that is becoming unlivable.
Life expectancy broadly recovered after the pandemic, but some developed nations diverged from their peers. That gap is concentrated in working-age adults.
A census is expensive and slow. Researchers increasingly work from mobility data, satellite imagery, and other high-frequency sources to see population change as it happens.
A survey written only in English quietly leaves out the households a researcher most needs to hear from. Those people do not appear as missing data. They appear as a community with no opinion.
The reason surveys went closed-ended was never that tick-boxes were better. It was that somebody has to read the free text, and at scale nobody does. That is the objection worth meeting head on.
People's descriptions of their own race, ethnicity, and gender change over time. Administrative categories change far more slowly.
Chronic conditions now drive most healthcare cost. Systems designed to treat one acute illness at a time are managing patients living with several at once, for decades.
Mental health has moved from an individual clinical concern to a population-level one, and demand on community services has risen faster than those services have grown.
Climate change increasingly reaches public health directly, through heat, shifting disease ranges, and air quality.
Where someone lives predicts their health with uncomfortable accuracy. The mechanisms behind that are social, economic, and structural.
Childhood vaccination rates have slipped in several countries, and antimicrobial resistance advances quietly in the background. Both depend on sustained collective behaviour.
Public health depends on collective behaviour, so trust functions as infrastructure. Health misinformation spreads faster than corrections do.
A large brand serves audiences with almost nothing in common. A message crafted for everyone often lands with no one.
No company can talk to ten million customers individually. What they do instead maps closely onto how public health studies a population.