Reliability

In real life, a reliable person means you can count on him being there for you over time. We think the same thing of products. We want a can of soup made by a certain company to be the same all the time. You can count on its taste and not to make you sick. You want a restaurant to put out consistently healthy and delicious food that costs the same each time. If one time it's good, another time it's bad, tha prices are all over the map, you won't go there.

In research reliability means that if you measure something at more than one point in time the measurements are relatively consistent within desired parameters. If you measure the age of umbrella owners one week and find that average is 48.5 years and replicate the study two weeks later and find the average age of the same group is 22.3 years, something is wrong. Your methodology does not produce reliable measures. You can't count on them.

Reliability is a real issue for entrepreneurs because if your business is new, people have to be sure they can rely on you being there for the long call. You have to convince them to buy from you the first time then give them reason to believe you'll be there next time.

An economical way of doing market studies is to sample small groups every so often to get a measure of reliability. Too many people do a big study once.

My second novel is out. Go to amazon.com and plug in my name and you'll come up with both mysteries, The Case of the Kearney Music School Murders and No Stop on Red. Neither is ready yet for the Kindle but will be.