In their element

Editor’s note: Robin Hilton is head of marketing at Dubit Ltd., a U.K.-based youth research and communications agency.

Researchers who have advocated online methodologies over the last decade have had a fairly tough fight of it but are being vindicated. Online is now recognized to be the fastest-growing area within the research industry and this is set to continue over the next few years. This growth is driven by the increasing use of online surveys and the provision of access panels to complete these. Additionally, slowly but surely, the public’s acceptance, comfort with and trust of the Internet means that qualitative research is catching up and we are seeing more companies adopt the Internet for in-depth research, mimicking traditional techniques as well as creating new ones.

One demographic that is more accepting of the Internet than others is young people. This generation has grown up with the Internet as part of their daily lives and as a tool for communicating. The use of blogs, forums, chat rooms and community sites means young people are comfortable sharing personal information online - they even create their own identities online to portray themselves. Blogs enable people to reveal their thoughts and opinions online where once they were kept under the pillow in a diary, although I accept that there are things written in a diary that do not find their way online! The point is that young people trust the Internet and this is helped by the sense of anonymity and security provided by giving the information from the comfort of their own bedroom or house.

These are some of the key reasons why the use of the Internet to research young people should be a preferred method. Young people are not as confident in conversing face to face and expressing themselves - they are keenly aware of how other people perceive them and will change their behaviors and responses to fit in. Many moderators have experienced a room of children or teens where it has taken half the allocated time to get them to converse. Or instances where their responses are so monosyllabic, the transcripts have taken no more than a sheet of paper! The skill of the moderator can help get young people to open up, but the anonymity and security their own habitat offers ensures more accurate and valid responses.

Online focus groups - or other forms of online qualitative research - do not always meet the needs of a research project but they can be used more often that not. Other researchers have debated the pros and cons of online qualitative techniques and I do not want to go over old ground (anyone who says young people cannot converse as easily through typing as they can through speech has not experienced the world of MSN and text messaging and needs to get out of youth research quick!) but there are some developments that may make people consider online where once they did not.

Encountered worries

Amongst clients who were shying away from using online, we have encountered worries about the mood-setting for the groups (in a study of cinema you can recruit on site and run groups at the location so the participants are already thinking film and cinema), the buy-in of the participant (ensuring their attention throughout the group), and questions about how accurately respondents represent themselves online (are they using a persona instead of their “real” self?). Clients were feeding back that lines of text on a computer screen were hardly stimulating and moderators were advising that kids were simply not interested.

In addressing these concerns we realized we needed to really engage the participants of any group online, get them interested, give them the opportunity to invest time in themselves online and make them feel they are going to have a real impact.

Our firm owns and runs a 3D community site that contains chat using avatar figures based in rooms on an island as well as forums and blogs and other interactive features. We found that young people were attracted to and spent time in the site’s rooms that reflected their profile. For example, the goths hung out in the graveyard and the skaters hung out in the skate park. We looked at this further and realized that the more young people are able to invest time in themselves online, the truer their reflection of self became and the more likely they were to be honest and retain an interest in what was being said.

Additionally we realized that young people were associating their online environment with the real-world environment and could affect their mood. For example if young people were talking about vacations, they were on the beach and if they were talking about pizza, they were in the pizza parlor. Obviously this was not exclusive and people did talk about vacations in the pizza parlor, but over the period of two weeks, 84 percent of conversations about vacations took place on the beach and 87 percent of conversations about pizza took place in the pizza parlor.

We realized that by combining the technologies from the community site and applying them to the online research environment we could allow participants to develop themselves online while allowing us to set the mood and tone for the research topic and engage the participants by wowing them at the same time.

The virtual viewing facility

Every participant invited to attend an online focus group is provided with the URL, a username and password. Having accepted to be part of the group each participant is contacted by phone to confirm their attendance and to ensure we have the correct details and a photo of them.

By entering their password the user is given access to the focus group site and is provided with the 3D character that most closely represents them from the profiling information and photo they have provided. They are able to further personalize their avatar, choosing from different combinations including hair style/color, skin tone, clothes and accessories. This helps engage the participant and allows them to spend time online creating themselves, ensuring better buy-in. Having selected their look, the participants enter the room - this is where the opportunity lies to set the mood and to further immerse them. The room is built in 3D and our designers can create the room to suit the research theme. For example, if testing cinema and film we create a cinema hall, if we are testing packaging for a new sports drink, we can create a sports hall.

The moderator invites the respondents to sit down on the allocated seating and is then able to manage the group. To see the profile of each participant you click on them to see their age, sex, location and picture. As with other online focus groups the moderator and client are able to communicate in private with the client viewing the group without appearing in the room and stimulus can be shown to the group in a variety of ways including videos and still images.

Recruitment is crucial

The success of any group relies heavily on the recruitment and it is essential that your participants are honest and who they say they are. To ensure this we retain a panel of young people in the U.K. aged 7-24, with those under 16 having parental permission. This panel is profiled and we also ask them to provide a picture of themselves, either uploaded or sent through the postal mail. This enables us to recruit more accurately for our clients and where we do not have the relevant profiling information we invite the panel to complete an additional profiling survey. This is completed without them knowing what client the groups are for - we can therefore ensure that the information they are providing is more accurate and then recruit from those that fit the criteria.

We always recruit more than the required number for our clients and advise those who may not be needed so they are aware of this in advance. Another advantage of the online groups is that the participants (and their parents) do not have to travel and so the inconvenience is limited and they are always compensated.

Getting teenagers to open up

A good example of the effectiveness of the online groups and the importance of good recruitment is a study we ran to understand teenage girls’ attitudes and feelings towards magazines. This on the surface appears straightforward but gaining insight into particular articles concerning very personal issues isn’t easy. We wanted to encourage open debate about these issues in a group environment but found that the girls were very wary of one another in a face-to-face group.

To recruit the participants for the online group we ran a survey to identify readers of the magazine titles we wanted to compare and frequency of purchase. Those who fit the profile of the groups we needed were then contacted to attend their group at an allocated time. We benefited here as we were obviously not bound be the location of the girls and we were able to recruit and arrange the groups quickly.

Sitting in their room at home (or school) with magazines and attending the group online in a room that is designed as a “chill out area” encouraged the girls to be far more responsive than they had been face to face.   They were supportive of each other when talking about problems and issues they had and this in turn encouraged each of them to open up even more.

The obvious savings in terms of time and cost were aided by the ability to ask questions that girls in a face-to-face environment may have shied away from answering honestly. The profiling information gathered prior to the groups allowed the moderator to have an insight into each participant’s life and allowing the girls to change their characters and the colors of their wall in their online room was a great way to break the ice. In addition to the research, the girls have also gone on to remain friends and are active in recruiting other young people on to our panel.

Retaining and growing a panel

The word-of-mouth activity that the girls in the case study above conduct on our behalf is essential to the growth and representative nature of our panel. This is important as the panel is also retained as an access panel, used by other panel companies, research agencies and clients as well as providing a source for recruitment to attend focus groups. We employ a panel manager and use panel software which ensures members are not overused.

Also key to the validity of our panel is that it remains as independent of parents as we can make it. We therefore recruit directly amongst the youth audience and where we have need for children under 11 years old to complete surveys, we retain a schools panel consisting of over 300 primary schools across the U.K. This schools panel allows younger pupils to complete surveys online in a controlled environment with the support of a teacher who is briefed by us prior to the fieldwork.

Finally, to retain the panel and also to encourage those who would not normally spend time online we pay for every survey they participate in. This payment is important but just as important is the regular communication and engagement we have to have with members.

The future is bright

I have covered here how we use our technology to engage participants in research online. There are many other ways researchers are using online to add value to their studies and these are proving very effective. So what does the future hold for research online?

There is a risk of research burnout - as more and more companies seek to get the responses of their audience, invitations to complete surveys could become as annoying (and ignored) as pop-up advertising.

But generally the future is bright. Advances in broadband and Web cam technology are allowing researchers into people’s homes and providing 24-hour access to people’s lives without the intrusion of an ethnographer in their house.

The focus group will continue to be the mainstay of most qualitative research, at least for a while, but there will be a few changes. We are already conducting one-on-one depths over the Internet using Web cam technology. We are running paired groups using Web cams where the respondents can see each other and the moderator and the client can see the expressions of the participants and how their body language.   We will soon be able to run focus groups of six to eight people, each participant in the comfort of their own home or office and each being able to see everyone in the group.

Not all research needs will be fulfilled online, but in a world where time is becoming the most valued commodity, what client is not going to want to use it when the outcomes are exactly the same?