A look ahead

Editor’s note: H. Grace Fuller is executive director at the RIVA Training Institute, Bethesda, Md.

Sheila looked at her watch to check how much longer she had on the flight to Seattle. Her three face-to-face focus groups with resistors weren’t until tomorrow but she still watched time, a habit from the days when she traveled on the same day as her groups. Although airport security checks were quicker, unlike the first year after the attacks, Sheila didn’t plan on reliable air travel as she had before. Gone were the days when she could assume that scheduled flights would fly. No more planes in the U.S. had been turned into deadly missiles, as they had been that September in 2001, but there were fewer flights now. Under the federalized air transportation system, cancellations and delays were frequent.

Sheila was one of the divas of qualitative research. Conducting groups face-to-face had become her niche. Sheila had always loved the travel as much as the research itself.

Back in Charlotte, Sheila’s son, Charles, was preparing for his own groups to be held later in the week. Charles was a second-generation qualitative researcher, a frequent phenomenon lately and a sign that the industry had really come of age.

After Charles had completed his graduate work in anthropology at Columbia, he and his mother had expanded their consulting firm with an e-facility, headquartered at his home in central North Carolina. The firm had a teleconferencing studio complete with video cameras, monitors, and computers. The facility stayed dark most of the time, except when conducting in-situ groups or interviews that required high-resolution video. Most groups and IDIs Charles conducted were from his home office computer-cam with respondents participating from their own homes and offices. Telecommuting at least two days a week had been mandated by the federal government the year before.

Sheila and Charles’ current project was on global diseases for one of the United Nations world health agencies. They were researching perceptions, opinions, beliefs and attitudes of adults who were resistant to getting vaccinations and inoculations for diseases such as anthrax and smallpox. Charles and Sheila’s client knew from quantitative research that the profile of a resistor cut across socio-economic and international boundaries.

Charles listened to an e-mail message from an alliance colleague, Amina, in South Africa. They had met in an East African ethnography class when they were both in graduate school. She kept in contact via cell phone with her recruiters working in remote villages. Amina would conduct her set of groups telephonically while Charles and his colleagues in Pakistan and India would conduct their groups via the “Brady Bunch” 1 style, where moderators and respondents communicate via their individual computer cams with everyone’s live-action face appearing in a grid on the same screen. Charles was conducting all the North American and European groups using language-translator software when needed. He had studied Spanish and Chinese in school, but had never learned French and never even thought he would need Dutch.

Amina had sent a message to Charles that the recruiting was on target and requested a release that the client would forego IID (iris-ID) respondent verification for the African groups. Each human iris was as unique as fingerprints and easier to obtain. This IID verification tool was becoming standard in research. In the last half of the twentieth century, citizens had been wary of “Big Brother” government, but in 2001 they embraced security measures after the infamous destruction of the first World Trade Center towers in New York City. Intelligence agencies were controlling the terrorist movement and most citizens believed they had less to fear from their internal governments than from external threats. Most people gave little resistance to having their iris-ID catalogued.

The U.S. IID catalogue was 85 percent complete. Iris profile capture was done through the motor vehicle departments at the state level, then fed to a federal databank. As a concession to those concerned about a Big Brother oligarchy, the IID information system was made available to the public via the Web.

The ability to confirm the identity of respondents brought down a major barrier to online research. No longer was there uncertainty about whether respondents on the other end of a computer were who they said they were. With computer-cams and special software with links to the IID database site, a moderator and respondents could see one another, and view demographic data on each respondent.

Charles sent a message to check in with other alliance members working on the global health project. In addition to the e-groups and Sheila’s brick-and-mortar groups, other interviewers were conducting at-home interviews in North America. Older field workers whose jobs had been threatened as technology came into widespread use in the 1990s still had valued interviewing skills. Technology had become friendlier as high-quality voice-recognition software costs dropped. Workers no longer had to type fast or know numerous software keyboard commands. The focus had returned to skilled and empathetic interviewers who knew how to establish productive rapport.

As Sheila’s plane touched down, she thought about how much of the world in 2005 is no longer as certain as it used to be, but the need for people to connect and for researchers to understand prevails.

Notes

1 Attribution for “Brady Bunch” name goes to Jeff Walkowski of QualCore.com.