Editor's note: Paul Rubenstein is president and CEO of Accelerant Research, Charlotte, N.C. He can be reached at 704-206-8501 or at paulr@accelerantresearch.com. This article appeared in the July 23, 2012, edition of Quirk's e-newsletter. 

 

The explosive growth of social media usage and blogging behavior over the past few years suggests that society has become comfortable with - and adept at - engaging in these activities. Accelerant's experiences conducting immersive qualitative research suggest that people can skillfully communicate their thoughts, feelings, intentions and actions - as well as their deepest fears and greatest aspirations - in a computer-mediated environment. But how are blogging and posting to Facebook related to research?

 

Blogging essentially includes obtaining online information (text-, video- or audio-based) as well as inputting one's own information, in any of those formats, into an online platform to be shared with others. Now compare these blogging activities to those involved in qualitative research in which a moderator poses questions to study participants and receives answers. A discussion ensues. Sometimes the moderator shows participants some "things" and has them provide their attitudes and opinions. Other times the moderator might require the participants to provide "things" to be seen, heard and/or discussed. Thus, there is parity between the typical activities involved in blogging and in qualitative research.

 

A shift from the traditional, face-to-face methodology to the Internet seems to be a safe and logical one, given the general comfort level communicating within this medium, but would some part of the human condition be lost in the process?

 

Taking a balanced perspective, we see that on one hand, the social space of computer-mediated communications was once considered lean, cold and superficial. Relative to in-person communications, online communicators were presumed to suffer from a reduction in social cues and be unable to transmit nonverbal information such as voice inflection, accents, facial expressions, posture, body language and touching. On the other hand, society has adapted. We've risen to the occasion as a culture and developed ways to express these nonverbal cues in written form. To do so, society uses new symbols and electronic paralanguage such as emoticons, special character strings, intentional misspellings, absence or presence of corrections, capitalizations, as well as with images and sounds.  

 

Inherent flaws

 

Market researchers have used focus groups and in-depth interviews (IDIs) for their qualitative research needs for the past several decades. Regardless of where qualitative research studies fit in the sequence of an integrated research program, qualitative techniques are distinguished from quantitative studies by what they yield: data that reflect the rich (symbolic) world that underlies consumer needs, desires and brand decision criteria.

 

However, these tried-and-true qualitative methods, while effective for what they are designed to produce, have their inherent flaws. They are artificial and contrived because they require the respondent to be removed from the actual consumer behavior during interviewing (i.e., data are collected in a decontextualized setting). As such, this common byproduct of standard qualitative research designs attenuates the researcher's ability to gather data in a natural setting.

 

Also, moderators, interviewers and ethnographers are considered obtrusive since they are required to be present with respondents. Whether interviews are conducted in-person or via telephone, moderators pose their questions and (hope to) get honest answers while limiting exposure of respondents to the data-biasing influences of their presence (e.g., social desirability). They also rely heavily on the memory capacity of respondents since most studies require respondents to travel back in time in their minds, recall relevant experiences and provide input and perspectives based on those memories.

 

Ethnography, in particular, is a useful method in focusing on consumer behavior in that behavior is observed, participants are interviewed and the subject matter is studied in a naturalistic setting (e.g., home, place of business, etc.). However, the very presence of the ethnographer fosters social desirability and other response sets - perhaps to the greatest extent relative to other qualitative study designs - due to the ethnographer immersing themselves into the respondent's living space. Also, ethnographies can be time-consuming, logistically complex, limited in geography to key cities and expensive.

 

Several of the flaws and inherent drawbacks of in-person methods of qualitative research can be reduced or eliminated while other aspects enhanced through the use of online, blog-based research. A Web site can be designed to have a similar look and feel to social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn so that the general population can easily navigate within it and respondents can fulfill their study-related responsibilities and receive incentives for doing so. The moderator can post content from the question guide for the study to the site and participants recruited to the study can enter, see the moderator's posted questions and respond accordingly.

 

Distinct advantages

 

When you combine widespread broadband penetration with consumers' high comfort level with technology, a vision starts to emerge that shows distinct advantages of Internet-based methods.

 

Imagine online qualitative studies that encroach upon the most in-depth form of qualitative, namely ethnography. For example, in focus groups, only verbal and non-verbal data are collected. In ethnographies, verbal and non-verbal data are collected but this input is augmented with artifacts and objects representing symbols of the culture of the behavior under study.  

 

An online "blognography" can be conducted in which study participants are required to snap photos and create videos to document and represent the subject under study. They would be instructed to upload these multimedia data to the online research platform along with their text-based responses to questions and other instructions posted by the online moderator/blognographer. These multimedia data would serve as ethnographic artifacts and contain all the complementary characteristics of data that augment the insights obtainable by text alone.

 

Surely, we're in a state of technology readiness where we can provide consumers images, photos, videos and other types of stimuli to use as the basis for their attitudes and opinions. Likewise, consumers are equipped to provide the same types of stimuli to us, as they can upload their content onto research sites - just as they would on Facebook or YouTube - to be viewed and analyzed by the qualitative researcher. Even more importantly, we are in a state of consumer readiness, too. People are simply comfortable and inclined to pull out their smartphones, snap photos, shoot videos, share them with friends as electronic attachments or posted to social media sites and then go to those sites and opine on some related subject.  

 

In addition, the Internet affords a stronger sense of anonymity among study participants so typical response biases such as social desirability and other "faking" strategies are virtually eliminated. Qualitative data collected online tend to be brutally honest, as respondents feel wrapped in a cocoon of privacy and facelessness and have no apprehension about telling a moderator anything. Furthermore, depending on the nature of the study, respondents' homes may actually be the place where the behavior under study takes place naturally and be the optimal site for data collection.

 

With regard to the amount of data that are produced, an online study will, by design, allow all participants to speak at the same time since question-guide content is posted on the site and awaits the participant's login during some time period communicated during recruitment. In focus groups and IDIs, the typical respondent has only about 10 minutes to provide his/her input during a two-hour focus group. That participant's online counterpart has about 10 times that amount of input time.

 

Further, transcriptions are automatically procured and integrated with quantitative data collected during recruitment, which enables sorting of text and other data into subgroups for comparative purposes.

 

Plausible if not compelling 

 

The idea of leveraging technology to improve conditions for market research is about as old as the industry itself. Surely, online focus groups have been around for quite some time, typically done as a substitute for standard, facility-based ones when the target population is geographically dispersed. But the confluence of conditions that have turned millions of people into bloggers and the current status of Internet connectivity and digital technology has made the notion of conducting online ethnographies, IDIs and group discussions very plausible, if not compelling. Â