A major change is taking place as market research becomes more professional in the way in which it is organised and controlled. On the executive side, research suppliers have always brought a high level of skill and dedication to devising research proposals and methodologies that will provide research buyers with the kind of data they need to improve their decision making processes, but this has not always been matched by the development of procedures to ensure that research surveys are carried out in the field and at the processing stages to the highest quality standards. 'Caveat emptor' is no longer accepted as a satisfactory tenet governing the way business in general or market research in particular should be conducted.

One response to this from research buyers has been to change the way tenders for research projects are requested and evaluated. Many major research contracts are now put out to tender by purchasing departments rather than by a specialist market research departments. However, the difficulties purchasing departments often experience in deciding between alternative quotations (unless they decided simply to accept the lowest tender), has caused them to start looking for some kind of quality measure they can use to assess the tenders they receive - and this in turn has led to an increasing demand that research suppliers should conform to a recognised standard such as ISO 9001.

However, ISO 9001 is not a true quality standard. All that a company has to do to conform is to write down exactly how it goes about its business in every detail and then put in place systems to monitor the production processes in order to ensure that the specified procedures are indeed followed. Officially appointed accreditation agencies carry out inspections to check independently that this is being done. In practice the introduction of ISO 9001 has led to considerable quality improvements in many agencies by bringing a degree of standardisation to a company's practices, which in turn has led to a higher degree of comparability and consistency between surveys. But this is not enough. As more and more studies are conducted on a multi-country basis comparability across national borders is becoming increasingly important, as well as greater comparability between research suppliers within the same country and greater comparability within one research supplier when studies are repeated over time.

This issue is now being addressed and major developments are beginning to take place that could well change the face of research in the years ahead.

The need for some kind of quality control system in market research has been recognised for a long time. The origins of the system now being developed internationally began in the United Kingdom back in the mid 1970s and later evolved into a system called the 'Interviewer Quality Control Scheme' (IQCS). The major difference from earlier schemes was that IQCS included specific requirements governing the way in which interviewers were trained and supervised. Minimum standards were introduced for the first time and have slowly been raised over the years. Later still this scheme was established as an official quality standard recognised and monitored by the British Standards Institute. This standard covers all aspects of the research process from questionnaire design, through sampling, fieldwork and data analysis to the final report.

Meanwhile, EFAMRO had been established as a federation of national market research trade associations in Europe. Through this medium, other countries became better informed about what was happening and one by one they began to introduce Quality Standard systems of their own. At first these were operated by national trade associations as quality schemes which their members were required to adhere to when conducting market research surveys, but in 1998 the Board of EFAMRO decided that the time had come to attempt to harmonise the various national schemes.