Whether you’re a seasoned research professional, a newbie, or whether you dabble in research for other job responsibilities (like marketing or strategy) you will probably find something you don’t yet know in our winter newsletter with a feature article on 25 Things You Might Not Know About Research. It covers topics from stats, to charts,…
The Economist ran an article a few weeks ago from which I have borrowed the title of this post. It puzzles over British politicians railing against focus groups for message testing and trying to understand voter sentiment, while continuing to rely on them as heavily as ever. “In an era when voters are monitored, tracked…
Nobody gets really good at market research by taking classes. It comes from learning on the job and in the field from other researchers. That is because researchers are always solving new problems and answering new questions that have never been asked before. That inspired us to make our summer newsletter The Big “How To”…
Here is an excellent quote from the New York Times’ Ana Marie Cox in her farewell commentary after two years of conducting in-depth interviews with famous people for the weekly “Talk” column: Being a good interviewer takes skill, just not the skill most people assume: You don’t have to be able to ask or come…
The best innovation in qualitative methods over the last decade is not online focus groups or bulletin boards or MROCs (Market Research Online Communities). It’s the smartphone. Your customers can snap pictures, take videos, and document all their thoughts and behaviors as they go about their everyday lives, generating some of the richest qualitative data…
A really good qualitative researcher knows how hard (and how frustrating) it can be to get respondents to tell us things we want to know. We have our interview guide, with all our questions laid out in a nice logical progression. But often when we ask questions, respondents have less to say than we had…
The pointy-hair boss has a point here, even though he does not realize it. From a research perspective, focus groups should provide rich, new, and surprising depths of insight, not necessarily “reliable” data. In fact, that’s why we typically suggest doing multiple focus groups, in different locations, with different types of participants. We want each…
We read the most irritating claim about focus groups several weeks back, which inspired us to begin writing about why it was so wrong. But we realized somebody else could do it better than we could—a true expert on focus groups who built a thriving research business by conducting focus groups (among other qualitative methods)…
The bowls of M&Ms, the soft drinks, the boxed sandwiches for the research team. The costs of a focus group really add up, don’t they? Well, suppose you brought in a troupe of improvisational comedians for the group. What would that cost? Um, how does $65,000 sound? That is a steep price for innovation, but…
One of the most useful techniques for in-depth qualitative interviewing is to ask respondents not only what they think, but what their friends, family, or colleagues think. It opens a whole new level of conversation and insight because all of the sudden respondents feel free to talk about their understanding and assessment of the world…