<b><b>Compiling and publishing a major customer based survey of satisfaction for the industry is a tough and thankless task. Malcolm Pitcher praises the efforts of the Housing Forum, but argues that it is time to abandon the star system</b></b><br><b>Iwas reminiscing the other day with an old mate from my car days. We talked about the big groundbreaking projects we were lucky enough to work on and then he mentioned the pan-European multi-client research surveys we got involved with.</b><br><b>I shuddered.</b><br><b>How I remember the endless meetings pouring over methodology, sampling and questionnaire design. Meetings that often seemed to make no progress whatsoever. Every one of these surveys seemed to overrun and be over budget.</b><br><b>The only good thing was that each meeting was in a different country. Discussing sampling issues whilst looking out over a Barcelona skyline somehow made the subject of statistical significance feel a whole lot nicer even if at least half the attendees hadn&amp;’t got a clue what the speaker was going on about.</b><br><b><b>cautious approach</b></b><br> For sure, multi client studies are important but ever since those days I have approached research by committee with extreme caution. <p></p><p>In my view therefore we should all congratulate the Housing Forum for doing a …