Editor’s note: Tim Macer, managing director of U.K. consulting firm meaning ltd., writes as an independent software analyst and advisor.

Revelation provides a Web-based software platform for qualitative research data collection. It follows the bulletin board or asynchronous model, where participants are invited and will typically participate over an extended period of several days or weeks. However, unlike typical Web-based bulletin board or blogging software, Revelation is packed with capabilities that are finely-tuned to the needs of the qual researcher or moderator, so that data can be collected in a semi-structured way through sequences of questions or participatory activities.

The interfaces for both researcher and participant are very clear, attractively designed and easy to navigate. The software is deliberately non-branded, not even with the Revelation imprint. The researcher interface centers around a dashboard, which provides an overview of all current activities and lists all postings by participants to any of your current studies under a “what’s new” heading. Another area provides the tools to set up a project and a third area provides a range of filtering tools, to allow you to query and analyze your data to some extent, and to export reports and transcripts, which you can then analyze in greater depth in coding tools such Atlas.ti, NVivo, MAXQDA, winMAX or XSight. Unfortunately, there isn’t currently any provision for transferring transcripts with any of the existing classification or tagging provided within Revelation.

The Project

The basic component of Revelation is the Project. It is a one-click action to create a project. The next step is to create the “activities” that will comprise your project. The idea is that you will be asking your participants to log into the project with a particular regularity (e.g., once every day for two weeks). Each time they log in, you need to have an activity ready for them to complete.

Revelation provides you with a toolbox of what it calls “stimuli and collectors” which you use to build up an activity. Six of them let you present stimuli - a piece of text to read, a still image, audio or video. You can also present a Web site or document, like a PDF. Another 16 allow you to collect different kinds of data. There are two for text: a single line of text; or a block. You can collect radio-button or checkbox-type answers to pre-coded lists. There are fields for dates or monetary values, name, address and phone numbers. Then there are prompts to upload an image or a video, or the URL of the Web site, to take you into the area of Web 2.0 and user-generated content.

A task could therefore start by asking the person to upload a picture - say, a favorite vacation destination, or a picture specially taken of this evening’s dinner - followed by asking them to add a single-line caption, a couple of pre-coded or yes/no questions relating to the picture, before several in-depth probes, asking for thoughts and feelings about different aspects of the picture or the occasion being discussed. The beauty of this software is in the flexibility that it provides for very simply building up these question-and-answer elements. Activities can be one-off, or they could recur, such as for a diary-type activity. You can also choose whether tasks are private or whether participation can be shared among the cohort of other participants, to allow for group activities. There is also a tool for creating discussion boards.

When you launch a project, you select and invite participants. There is an option to bulk-upload participants from a list (e.g., in Excel). You can also define demographic data or apply segments or categorizations and include these in the participant data - or ask them to provide this data by completing their profile when they first log in.

You then cue up your activities for release at a particular time - you could write all your activities in advance for a short two- or three-day study, or just have the first few prepared for longer studies, so that you can react to the material that is coming in.

A neat feature is the one-to-one message. You could be reading through the day’s “what’s new” and see a bit of information from a respondent and want to probe further. You can send them a message, and the response they make will even be plugged into their transcript in the right position when you come to analyze it. You can be selective in assigning tasks to participants - selecting them by demographic, by segment or by individual name, which provides another means to be individually responsive in your questioning.

It is something else

Diane Fraley is president of Chicago-based D.S. Fraley Associates, a firm that specializes in qualitative and ethnographic research. For the past two years, Fraley has been seeking new ways to use the Internet to carry out qualitative research more selectively and in greater depth. “I don’t think of Revelation as software, I think of it as a new research methodology,” Fraley says. “And I don’t think there is anything else out there that matches it. It is not bulletin board and it is not chat: it is something else.

“I looked at bulletin board and I looked at live chat, and I had decided I would go the bulletin board route. Then I stumbled into Revelation and it fits how I do research, which is the deeper side of qualitative research. With focus groups you have an hour or two with your group, and I cannot do anything in that limited time frame that’s in any kind of depth. From each participant, you get about 10 minutes talk time, maximum. You don’t capture life moments like you can with this. You can even invite the rest of the family in, so you get a true perspective.”

One of the first studies for which Fraley used Revelation was to reposition a beer brand with a strong regional identity. She recruited a group of young males, a key target group identified for the brand revival. Rather than run the conventional series of focus groups, she made the incentive more generous, and recruited a smaller group to a longer study. “I took these 25-year-old guys and had them online every day for six weeks. I spent a week finding out about them. Then I gave them three homework assignments to do. Because it was beer, I said to them, ‘I want you document the occasions when you drink beer. Document an occasion when you drink beer by yourself; an occasion when you drink beer with a buddy and an occasion where you drink with a group.’”

For each assignment Fraley prepared different templates in Revelation, each tailored to the specific occasion. The template allowed the participant to start by uploading a picture, and then answer a series of follow-on questions to tell the full story and background of the event.

“Revelation is the only software I know that that seems to have these templates, and I have the choice whether I want to share one person’s responses with other participants or keep them one-to-one,” Fraley says.

“The software is like ABC, it is so easy. It is user-friendly and presents you with all the building blocks. On the one hand there are all the instructional texts and the other hand are the responses. The real skill, when writing a template, is in how to create storytelling concepts - how you flow them through what you want to learn. You have to remember that the respondent cannot look quizzically at you when they don’t understand, so the moderator has to be good at writing,” she says.

When the projects are completed, Fraley will tend to do some initial queries on the data using the analytical capabilities within Revelation, but for more in-depth analysis, she finds it easy to export a transcript organized by individual or segment, and feed this into a coding program. “The tool is amazing because you can filter your data, and the order of the transcript follows the logical order of the template,” she says.

“If you look at the overall value of this, the cost of using Revelation is very economical. Where the cost goes is the time it takes to read through and analyze the data. The upside and downside of this method is the sheer volume of data you get. While the data is richer and deeper, clients simply do not want to read all of the data.”

To compensate for the lack of viewing-facility sessions, Fraley advises involving clients by assigning them specific participants to monitor and observe. Revelation allows you to create specific observer log-ins for clients. She recommends that the researcher provide frequent debriefs to the client by phone. She also cautions: “There may be a thousand or more pages of data from one of these studies, but the clients will still ask for their reports in the same amount of time!”

Easily fit

Revelation is only available as a Web-based hosted solution, running remotely on the provider’s servers. Pricing is based on usage, with the unit cost being the participant day. Packages start at $1,000 for 75 participant days and subsequent access for 90 days for analysis time, or $1,500 for 150 participant days, with volume discounts available. This is not inexpensive, but compared to the cost of hiring a focus group facility, travel and hospitality, these charges should easily fit within most research budgets and leave some change. 

It would be wrong to look at Revelation only as a means to save money, though that could be one welcome benefit of using the method, along with wear-and-tear on the qualitative researcher, who perhaps gets to travel a bit less. To me, the real benefit of this method is its ability to take qualitative data gathering from the artificial confines of the focus group into the realms of the ethnographer, by working directly within the participants’ own fields of experience as they go about their daily lives.