Editor's note: Jennifer Larsen is managing director at Fader and Associates, a New York research firm.

As qualitative market researchers, we are skilled at making participants comfortable in focus groups or interviews but sometimes it helps to do the opposite. When you nudge someone to step out of his/her comfort zone, you often get more in return.

Nearly every participant who comes to research has some preconceived notions of what’s going to happen. Who hasn’t seen a focus group, even if it’s just in parody form à la Saturday Night Live, Domino’s Pizza, Snickers, etc.? (FYI, I will refuse to moderate focus groups with the Snickers sharks.) The participants enter the room with a plan in mind of exactly what the topic is, what they know and think about the topic and some idea of what they will be asked about it.

However, when the discussion does not follow the expected path, causing the participants to experience a few uncomfortable moments, they are surprised into letting their guard down and thinking a little deeper. And by becoming more engaged in the conversation, they also tend to enjoy it even more.

Take the group on a trip back in time. Does anything bond a group of people more than making it through those awkward high school years together? While we don’t have a time machine, we like to recreate a little piece of that. We give participants a homework assignment and then ask them to present it to the class (I mean, group) at the start of the discussion. They have observed themselves in their natural environments and committed to their opinion prior to attending the research but having to do “an oral report” in front of a room full of near-strangers is no easy feat. But unlike in high school, the group bonds together and helps each other through the discomfort. You can feel this bonding change the tone in the room. The group feels like they are all in it together and they share things with each other that they might not have, had they not bonded through the first few minutes of nervous tension in the group.

Revel in the tangent (at least a little). It also helps to know when a participant needs a little help feeling comfortable. Adult participants expect to do a quick introduction, briefly telling you about themselves – their marital status, their occupation, number of kids, etc. But if you ask them to go on a tangent by elaborating further on one of these points, you can see the surprise on their faces. Sometimes, an irrelevant or even irreverent question can actually melt the discomfort. For example, I once asked someone, “I have to know, how did you decide to be a mortician?” And he laughed disarmingly, said “Long story … ” and then proceeded to tell me. His answer (that he was writing a TV show pilot about a funeral home – we were in L.A., after all) was not immediately relevant to the research and I am sure the clients in the back room were scratching their heads but sometimes an unexpected tangent is just what is called for.

For me, it served two purposes. It helped make the participant feel more comfortable with me, because he got to reveal a little bit about himself and his dreams and it gave me key insights into the person sitting in front of me that I used as a prism through which to view the rest of his feedback.

For kids groups, if you see a kid squirming, give them a chance to complain about that annoying little sister of theirs. No kid will refuse the chance to vent and chances are they will find a few allies in the room too! It also turns you, the moderator, into an ally of sorts.

By bucking the expectation that the group needs to stay on-topic 110 percent of the time, you can actually free the participant to reveal more about themselves and their true feelings about the topic at hand.

Embrace awkward silences. Sometimes when you ask a participant to brainstorm or list everything they are thinking or feeling in a situation, they will throw out a few easy, top-of-mind responses and stop without looking inward for more. Don’t fill the silence. Let it grow uncomfortable until the participant looks to fill it. Sometimes, the best answer is not the quickest and when they dig deeper they come up with really great insights.

Reset expectations. No demographic knows the market research script better than physicians. They rush you through the confidentiality mumbo jumbo with a nod and a wave of the hand and rattle off their stats – years in practice, number of beds in the hospital, basic patient makeup, etc. Then they slump back in their seats and wait for you to show them a product profile to critique or probe their treatment algorithms.

But hand them a funny little drawing or a stack of random pictures and they sit up and take notice. Some become so uncomfortable that they will even tell you that they can’t do the exercise – it’s not how their minds work. But with a little encouragement and gentle (or not-so-gentle) prodding, they will laugh and play along and take great pains to describe and even do something like draw the typical woman who would use competing birth-control methods. And they too are often surprised by the insights revealed, like they don’t just look at a patient’s medical characteristics when considering her birth-control solutions.

Truly see themselves

While you of course can’t and shouldn’t keep the participants off-center for the entire discussion, sometimes participants can only truly see themselves if they step out of their comfort zone. Therefore, we, as qualitative researchers, should not fear uncomfortable moments, because these moments can often lead to incredible insights.