A nation in transition

Editor’s note: David A. Jodice is president of D3 Systems, Vienna, Va. David T. Bottomley is managing director of Asia Marketing Research Directions, Hong Kong.

China presents market researchers with challenges foreign to those encountered in developed nations. In some ways, the techniques and practices that have to be used - door-to-door surveys being a prime example - are, to Western eyes, those of the past.

But the profound revolution occurring today in China is rapidly changing the situation. The revolution is economic, not political, and one of the major benefits for people has been a remarkable - staggering to many non-Chinese - increase in communication facilities.

The Chinese government has very successfully implemented policies of making color television sets and telephones accessible to everyone. Phones have become so accessible that about 85 percent of homes in urban areas now have fixed line handsets with 100 million mobile sets currently in use, a number that is expected to double in the next few years.

The high proportion of homes with fixed line phones means that market researchers are now able, for many types of surveys, to change from door-to-door to telephone techniques.

Initially, people were suspicious about market researchers’ calls but with increasing usage, they more readily answer telephone questionnaires. Computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) systems will soon be common in this vast and rapidly modernizing land.

In rural China, however, the fixed-line take-up has not been as rapid as in the cities - only about 59 percent of homes have them installed - and so in mid-2000 in setting out to conduct a survey in rural regions as well as the cities, knocking on doors was still the only practicable technique for interviewers to use.

The survey was the first part of a three-wave study designed to measure Chinese consumers’ purchasing aspirations and to assess the social and economic issues that are important to them. The second wave was fielded in March and the third wave in the autumn.

The study, “China in Transition: a national survey of Chinese consumers’ appliance purchasing, media interests and economic conditions,” is believed to be one of the first to tackle rural China on a large scale and to provide a comparative analysis of urban and rural urban Chinese attitudes.

Both waves were conducted in the 11 largest cities and in two different sets of 10 provinces. The cities were Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, Wuhan, Shanyang, Guangzhou, Chonqung, Harbin, Nanjing, Xi’an, and Chengdu, which had a combined population in 1998 of 43.24 million, ranging from about 9 million in Shanghai to 2 million in Chengdu. The sample of 1,650 persons, aged 18 to 60, was distributed in proportion to the city urban populations.

In the first wave, the provinces, which had a population of about 570 million people in 1998, were Guangdong, Jiangsu, Heilongjiang, Shandong, Jiangzi, Henan, Sichuan, Guizhou, Ningxia and Shanxi. In the second wave, the provinces, which had a population in 1998 of 455 million, were Anhui, Hebei, Shandong, Henan, Sichuan, Zhejiang, Fujian, Ningxia, Hunan, and Yunan.

One county was selected in each province and within those counties interviews were conducted in clusters of small towns, typically with populations of 5,000 to 15,000 people. All were in agricultural districts. The sample of 1,500 persons, also aged 18 to 60 years, was distributed across the 10 provinces proportionately to their populations (after excluding any urban areas covered in the major cities’ sample).

Less arduous

The economic revolution is also producing a rapid improvement in China’s transport system, making fieldwork far less arduous than even five years ago, especially in rural areas. Then, roads were narrow and filled with cyclists, agricultural vehicles and trucks; drivers believed vigorous use of horns could somehow miraculously lift their vehicles over the throng.

Now, rural road travel is much faster along modern toll-roads and even in the more remote regions there are super-highways with attractively painted signs in Chinese and English, green painted railings and crash barriers and speed limits of 110 kph and 120 kph.

But the revolution has still not progressed sufficiently to overcome a variety of other difficulties not encountered by researchers operating in developed countries. Apart from communication limitations, suspicion about the purpose of research, a lack of up-to-date demographic data, and the lack of a strong pool of experienced interviewers provide challenges.

When in Australia earlier this year, one of us (David Bottomley) asked colleagues about current sampling and interviewing practices. “You know, I haven’t been asked questions like that for 20 years,” one replied. And of course, that is the situation in countries with established market research industries. It is assumed that any well-known company conducts its fieldwork efficiently and clients may concentrate on the results without worrying whether their data are reliable.

Consumer research in China could not develop on any scale until about 20 years ago, when ownership of property by Chinese families became respectable and interviewers could door-knock without exciting the suspicion of authorities.

Even so, local authorities may still intervene. A year ago, four interviewers working just over the border from Hong Kong, in Shenzhen, for Asia Market Research Directions, were called in by police and questioned for some hours. The survey was simply about household use of raisins but the fact that students were knocking on doors late in the evening was suspicious.

From early in 2000 permission for all surveys had to be obtained from the State Statistical Bureau. This proved helpful for our “China in Transition” project where we were working in areas unused to household surveys and all interviewers carried a copy of the official certificate to show to consumers and authorities.

There was one exception in a rural town where the authorities refused to accept the certificate and wanted to prevent the survey. Our astute supervisor realized that the rejection was in no way political and did a deal to hire some facilities from the authorities. The survey went on.

Training, standardizing

Fifty years ago, in Australia, Unilever made a substantial contribution to the market research industry through its thorough training of supervisors and interviewers and by standardizing household selection procedures.

In China, during the past 10 years, Procter & Gamble has made a similar contribution. It has insisted that its research suppliers use standard methods of household sampling, similar quality control checking and has given extra training to research companies’ group discussion moderators. As researchers move around to other companies, P & G’s methods have diffused through the industry.

The result is that clients are likely to have their city surveys conducted by multi-stage urban sampling with interviews being allocated proportionately to each city region, small administrative districts being sampled within each region with probability proportional to residential population, and clusters of interviews conducted from each sampling point.

Sampling in rural areas is another matter. There is no up-to-date demographic information and a map of the town might not be available. So, for the first wave of our study, an area probability sample was constructed. The researcher prepared a sketch map of the town and gridded it so that lower density areas were allocated larger grids. Grids were then randomly selected and equal numbers of interviews allocated to each selected grid.

In the cities and in the rural towns quality controllers sketched the routes each interviewer was to take and designated which households were to be called on. In that way the interviewers had no discretion about the households where they were to obtain interviews.

Interviewers in China are usually tertiary or senior secondary students who are extremely enthusiastic but inexperienced. To overcome the problems associated with rural areas in which interviews had not previously been conducted, supervisors were brought to Beijing for an intensive, two-day training course on field and reporting methods. Later, rural interviewers were briefed on location and conducted practice interviews, under the guidance of our field managers, before starting their required fieldwork.

Because of the lack of experience, procedures need to be kept simple and supervision more rigorous than in places where experienced interviewers are available. To minimize errors, an independent selection of their routes and a high percentage of quality control checks - up to 40 percent of calls and interviews - needs to be made.

In the field, interviewing actually on a door-step is impractical because most people live in apartments and their doorsteps may converge with those of their neighbors.

So the lengthy (40-minute) interview with its many show cards was conducted indoors. But because most apartments are small and interviewing conditions were cramped, interviewers often sat on beds or on small stools. Lighting often was poor - meaning that no exhibits in red print could be used because they would become almost invisible in the dim light.

The length of the interview (some stretched to 70 minutes) would raise eyebrows among researchers (and probably respondents) in other countries where market research is common, but in China respondents show remarkable patience in answering questions. Perhaps the relative novelty of research is the reason.

Increasing viability

As we have shown, conducting marketing research in China is certainly different from conducting it in Western countries. But an improving infrastructure, increasing acceptance by the public, and an adherence to the same kind of standardized procedures used in more developed markets ensure that research in China will continue increasing in viability.