Editor’s note: Katrina Noelle is principal of KNow Research, qualitative marketing research consulting firm, San Francisco. Janet Standen is director of consumer insights at JS Strategic Insights, San Francisco.
The qualitative research landscape is ever changing and is full of new opportunities to embrace digital techniques and reinvent and revitalize in-person methods. However, the most optimal project design is often a hybrid approach as few methods can deliver the perfect solution alone. In these cases combining methods can provide the smartest results. A hybrid approach can be a mixture of different qualitative approaches, or it can be a combination of both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Here we will focus on a combination of qualitative approaches.
Telltale signs that your research objective could benefit from a hybrid approach:
- You have different targets best reached through different approaches.
- You have multiple activities for the same target.
- You want both in-the-moment feedback and reactions over time.
- You want both individual feedback and group interaction.
- You want an iterative process.
If any of these situations ring true, then it’s time to consider a qualitative hybrid project design!
Step 1: Choose your method(s)
Understanding the benefit that each approach brings to a project is key. The most effective hybrid projects use selected elements strategically.
Menu of qualitative options:
- in-person;
- via phone;
- synchronous/real time online;
- asynchronous online;
- mobile; and
- social media.
Step 2: Choose your vendor(s)
There is a profusion of companies offering digital platforms and tools as well as evolving in-person techniques. Our advice is to start with your discussion guide. Make a list of the types of activities you want to include in the project design (i.e. concept markup, mini-surveys, video feedback, collaging, projective techniques, co-creation activities, etc.). Then reach out to your vendor partners and make sure that the tools and techniques you are considering will be a good fit.
Step 3: Connect the dots
Make sure that your target participants, desired exercises and chosen vendors come together to form a customized research design that will meet your client’s objectives.
Some examples:
- mobile shopping homework leading up to in-home ethnographies;
- in-home interviews before an online bulletin board;
- Web-cam interviews, asynchronous discussion and surveys within a bulletin board; and
- in-person groups followed by user-experience mobile journals.
Hybrid design helps make qualitative research agile and effective. By picking and choosing from the array of options available to us today, we have the opportunity to create a unique research plan to meet client’s needs in the most effective way possible.
At times, clients are nervous about using new or unproven methodologies. However, new methods may be the best way to understand the target populations’ thoughts around a specific issue or product. Hybrid projects are the perfect way to dip a toe in the water of new techniques. If you show a client how much benefit you get from participants completing a mobile journal prior to arriving for an in-person group discussion, they may be much more likely to consider a more robust mobile project in the future!