Need to know
- You can get involved in our research through surveys and focus groups.
- Have your say on what's important to Australian consumers.
- This research feeds directly into our magazine and digital content, and ideas for future articles and campaigning work.
Your input, opinions and feedback help guide our work.
This is why we created our people-based research program, Voice Your CHOICE, to systematically and rigorously collect the points of view of Australian consumers.
Voice Your CHOICE is designed by CHOICE's Consumer Insights team to capture your opinions and feedback on a range of topics including:
- the products and services you use
- cost of living pressures
- other issues you're experiencing as a consumer
- CHOICE Magazine and choice.com.au.
Since inception in 2014, Voice Your CHOICE has:
- guided improvements on how we test products
- contributed to investigations that have led to changes across industries
- recruited taste testers for various supermarket foods we've reviewed
- contributed to many years of product reliability ratings.
You're likely to have come across insights gathered through Voice Your CHOICE when browsing the CHOICE website or reading the CHOICE Magazine.
Interested in sharing your opinion?
Sign up to Voice Your CHOICE and you'll soon receive your first invitation to a CHOICE research activity.
Any member or supporter of CHOICE can participate in Voice Your CHOICE.
We'll need an email address from you to send you research invitations.
You can expect to hear from us once a month. Research activities are usually open for about a week or two to provide your input.
Most research activities can be completed online, via your computer or on your smartphone. At times, we may invite you to speak to us directly on the phone or video conferencing software like Zoom. Due to COVID and because we seek to speak to people across the country, we rarely have in-person focus groups or home visits anymore.
You'll be invited to provide your feedback via a survey or similar research activity. We try to keep our surveys short: 5–10 minutes at most.
At times, we may ask you to speak to a member of CHOICE's Consumer Insights team directly over the phone or video conference to get a deeper understanding of your experiences. We'll let you know when that's the case.
Flexible participation
If an activity isn't of interest to you, you don't have to participate.
You can do as many or few as you like. There's no requirement on the number of activities you participate in.
And of course, you can unsubscribe at any time.
As an organisation that works for consumers, our questions primarily relate to your experiences buying products, navigating terms and conditions, taking out insurance policies and otherwise interacting with companies. The work CHOICE does is reflected in the questions you'll be asked.
You'll also be asked to provide some information about yourself and what your interests are. This helps us send you activities that are relevant to you. For example, we won't ask you about your experiences renting if that's not relevant to you.
It also allows us to analyse aggregate responses by people with shared interests or in similar circumstances, such as people with young kids compared to people with older kids.
Any information you provide us, including responses to research, is kept safe as per our privacy policy and will only be used for research purposes.
All members of the Consumer Insights team work according to the Code of Professional Behaviour for researchers.
We analyse your responses in aggregate.
At times, we may wish to use your comments in our articles or other publications. This will be done in an anonymous way, for example, "a survey respondent reported the following".
We will let you know when we plan to use direct quotes in our publications. And of course, you may choose to not have your comment published.
As a nonprofit organisation, we generally don't offer financial rewards to participate.
However, for more involved participation such as focus groups or phone calls of considerable length, we'll provide you with a financial thank you for your time.
Regardless of research activity and in exchange for sharing your opinions, you'll be given access to sneak peeks at the stories you've helped create, and you'll have a say on what we do here at CHOICE.
We hope you see this as an opportunity to help make CHOICE even better and to have your say on what's important to Australian consumers.
Stock images: Getty, unless otherwise stated.
