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If you set the hard quotas in your survey to force the users to look like Census Adults 18+, you will have a hard time getting the older adults and females because they aren’t as likely to be category users. More importantly, your sample won’t be representative of category users because you are forcing it to look like the U.S. Census. It is inappropriate and inaccurate to set quotas to census in surveys with a targeted sample. Forcing the sample could actually produce misleading data that may result in a bad business decision.

Let’s continue with the example above. Clearly, in this category, there are more male users than female users. If we test a product from the category, purchase intent is significantly higher among males than females. If we force the proportion of males and females to mirror census (49% male and 51% female) we get a top two box purchase intent of 46%. If the proportion of males and females is set to be representative of category users (63% male and 37% female) then we get a top two box purchase intent of 53%. This difference is going to be statistically significant in most cases and could mean the difference between moving ahead and not moving ahead with the product.