Best practice guidance for Australia's research industry

摘要

Australia joins the United Kingdom, Spain and France this month when it becomes the fourth nation to introduce an official quality Standard for its market and social research industry. After three years in development, Standards Australia launched AS 4752 in Sydney on 17 June 2004. The introduction of AS 4752 means that there is a comprehensive set of standards for the entire research process. The Standard provides for the following areas of responsibility: Section One: Scope and general/ Section Two: Systems structure and management/ Section Three: Project management and reporting/ Section Four: Data collection/ Section Five: Data management and processing. The market research industry had quality assurance standards in place for one section of the industry - data collection. Data collection standards were audited under an industry scheme called the Interviewer Quality Control Australia (IQCA). IQCA has been a hugely successful scheme, managed for the past 10 years by the quality assurance arm of the Market Research Quality Assurance (MRQA) association. The IQCA standards have been replicated in full in AS 4752 to maintain consistency with the scheme.