Page last updated: July 2010.
The sources for the research data include over 9,000 reviews / comments of actual mattress owners collected from diverse sources.
Our Sources Include:
Message / Discussion Boards
Over 70% of our research data comes from actual owner experiences collected from several hundred online message / discussion boards. Message / discussion boards are generally the best source for getting unbiased and authentic product reviews from actual owners. This is mainly because they tend to exist in near obscurity (most don't rank high in the search engines), are made up of a tight-knit group of people, and often have safeguards against suspicious contributors, such as someone who appears from nowhere to contribute to a mattress-related discussion.
In case if you don't know, message boards generally operate by someone posting a question and then others reply with answers. In this case, someone typically asks others what mattress they recommend or don’t recommend. People then reply with their opinions often based on their own mattress ownership experience.
Retailers' Websites
Online retailers such as Overstock, Wal-Mart, Sam's, and Costco among others provide their customers with the ability to rate and review products purchased from them. We have largely found the reviews on these websites to be credible, unbiased and unedited by the retailer.
Product Review Websites
A relatively small amount of our research data may come from product review websites, such as Epinions or Viewpoints. Generally, we regard these sources to have only fair credibility since virtually anyone can post a product review and are sometimes paid to do so. Consequently, we include only those reviews into our data that we can establish as credible to the best of our ability.
Personal Interviews
On occasion, we include owner data collected from personal interviews that we conduct. While the number of these interviews is small, the amount and quality of owner information they provide is often excellent.
Our Sources Do NOT Include:
Testimonials From Retailer or Manufacturer Websites
Most mattress manufacturer and retail websites feature testimonials from customers. These reviews are hand-picked by the website operators and consequently are invariably positive. Also, the truthfulness of such testimonials often cannot be proved. As a result, these testimonials do not have the needed credibility to be included in our research data.
Unsolicited Reviews
Sleep Like The Dead does not seek or accept mattress reviews from visitors to our website mainly because we cannot verify their credibility. We instead rely on what we regard as more credible sources for getting information from actual owners, namely online message boards and retailers' websites.
Large Sample Sizes + Diverse Sources = Accurate Findings
The sample size of at least 9,000 actual owner experiences is large enough in our opinion to provide accurate findings. We at Sleep Like The Dead are not expert statisticians, but we believe that our findings, especially for the comfort satisfaction ratings, have a maximum margin of sampling error of ±4 percentage points. We believe this because no matter how much data (information from owner reviews / comments) we add to each mattress type or brand, our findings do not extend beyond a range of a few percentage points.
For a mattress to be included in our primary research results (not supplemental results), we must be able to find at least 80 owner reviews. In addition, in most cases no one source makes up more than 20% of the total number of owner reviews / comments that are included in our data.
Safeguards To Ensure Precise and Accurate Information
To further ensure accurate findings, several measures were taken. Namely, no data was collected from mattress owners who indicated that they have slept on a particular bed for less than three days since this is often not enough time to form a solid opinion one way or the other.
Further, in cases where it was not clear if the reviewer owned the bed, the comments were not included in the data. (Owners were identified when they openly said they owned a particular bed, referred to the bed as “my bed” or identified themselves as an actual owner in some other obvious, non-ambiguous way.)
Information on Comfort Satisfaction Rating
The comfort rating for each mattress type or brand was computed by dividing the number of reviews / comments that indicated the mattress is comfortable by the total number of reviews / comments for the mattress (sample size). A mattress was considered comfortable by an owner if any or all of the following conditions were met:
- The mattress was explicitly described as comfortable.
- The mattress was described as allowing better sleep.
- The mattress was recommended to others.
- The owner stated that they like the mattress.
Unbiased, Truthful Content with Full Disclosure
We receive NO compensation of any
kind from any company, organization or individual to affect
in any way or degree the content of our website including
our product / owner research. Our mission is to help people
sleep better and this can only be achieved by presenting unbiased
and truthful information.
We have advertising on our site to provide us with financial resources to conduct our extensive research. Without advertising revenue, we simply would not have a website.
On every page of our site is the following advertising disclosure:
"Auto-generated advertisements by Google for the product(s) and / or type of product(s) discussed on this page may appear on this page. Sleep Like The Dead may generate revenue from such advertisements. In addition, links to a product(s) offered for sale at Amazon.com or Overstock.com may appear on this page, and Sleep Like The Dead will earn revenue if a product is purchased from these companies through previously mentioned links."
The advertising that appears on our website in no way affects
our website content or research results.
In addition, the truthfulness of our research findings can
be independently verified by anyone with a computer
and internet connection, given that they are willing to invest
enough time and effort. To do so, input queries into a search
engine, especially Google, that contain keywords such as "message
board", "discussion", "thread", "post",
"reviews", "ratings" etc. and then the
name of the product or brand you seek to find actual owner
information about. Each product category or brand will usually
have its own specific keywords which need to be used to achieve
optimal results. And searching many pages into the search
results for each query is often necessary to find relevant
information. In addition, one can visit retailers' websites (Overstock, Sam's Costco, etc.) to find mattress reviews from owners.