While it may seem counter-intuitive, sometimes conducting research in different countries in an identical manner is NOT the most effective approach!
This article draws on the experience of our ThinkGlobal Qualitative associates and provides examples of smart ways in which they modified market research for their countries in order to obtain more accurate results.
Read the article here: https://qrcaviews.org/2020/07/16/conduct-better-multinational-research-by-accounting-for-cultural-differences/
The advent of the Covid-19 pandemic has had a disproportionate impact on marginalized populations in the United States. This article by Roben Allong, Patricia Lopez and Iris Yim, the cover story of the July 2020 issue of Quirk’s magazine, explores possible contextual and cultural factors behind the pandemic’s impacts specifically on Hispanic, African American and Asian communities to provide a better understanding and foundation, post COVID-19, for more successful research studies and brand interaction, oriented towards these audiences.
Read the article here: https://bluetoad.com/publication/?i=665445&ver=html5&p=44
Covid-19 has changed the rules of human engagement. Behaviors such as hugging, kissing, laughing out loud, that we use to show connection and engagement, are no longer acceptable without wearing a face covering or social distancing. As the frequency of online qual research accelerates, this crisis presents a unique opportunity to adapt and create new best practices to facilitate a different, deeper, more meaningful interaction.
This article presents five guidelines that can be deployed to elevate engagement for a more insightful qualitative study, whether in-person or virtual, and may inspire you to re-think your approaches to engagement.
Read the full article here: https://www.qrca.org/blogpost/1488356/348234/Re-Thinking-the-Rules-of-Engagement-for-Virtual-Research-Theatre
Situation
Audience insight projects with charities (not-for-profits) can be extremely rewarding for qualitative researchers: the content is usually rich and deeply human, clients are usually highly engaged and supportive, and there is a real sense that the insights gained are helping make a difference to people’s lives.
However, the research process is often more complicated and demanding than in commercial projects. Here are some golden rules for conducting highly effective qualitative research with charities.
Multiple stakeholders – when researching fundraising ideas and communications with supporters and potential supporters, be aware that their feedback is only part of the picture. Other stakeholders involved with the charity (beneficiaries, staff, volunteers and corporate partners, for example) are likely to have strong views but may not be part of the official decision-making team. To avoid problems further down the line, try to involve as many of these groups as possible in the qualitative fieldwork – they are often very keen to take part, so are easy to recruit and a pleasure to interview. This will help deliver insights which take into account all of the voices that matter.
Manage guilt – charity supporters and potential supporters are driven by a variety of emotions when they consider giving their money and time – compassion, pity, anger and duty all play a part. The ‘elephant in the room’, however, is guilt – from potential supporters who feel bad that they aren’t giving at all; and from current supporters who feel they should be giving more. Unfortunately this sense of guilt manifests itself in lots of unhelpful ways – for example blaming governments, passing the buck, or becoming defensive or judgmental. The best way round this is to set up the discussion in a depersonalised way – to reassure participants that the research is designed to explore issues, not to coerce them into support – and to fully explore the issues facing the charity with your participants before testing any fundraising ideas.
Steer clear of toxic myths around the category – unfortunately a number of unhelpful myths have sprung up around the charitable sector – of widespread corruption, overpaid senior staff, mismanaged funds, and so on. Years ago these criticisms were only levelled at international development charities, but recently home-grown charities are coming under increasing fire. But in many cases these accusations are flimsy – driven by cynicism, personal guilt, or lack of imagination. Be confident in refuting these accusations within your research sessions (and ask your client for some positive supporting statistics if necessary), or ask participants to save them until the end of the discussion.
Prioritise content over channel – when exploring fundraising and comms with members of the public, two issues are raised time and time again: aggressive fundraising (especially on-street) and pushy requests for increased support (by post, email or telephone). Negative feedback on these techniques can easily railroad a research discussion and draw focus away from the issues being researched. Furthermore, feedback on comms channels can also be deeply misleading (for instance, most people claim to throw away hard copy direct mail but to read fundraising emails, when in fact the reverse is often true). The moral of the story? Don’t discuss fundraising channels in qualitative research: instead use the time available to gain creative, open, constructive feedback on the content that you are testing.
Propositions – charities often script their fundraising propositions as a corporate would: with insights, benefits, reasons to believe and calls to action. Fundamentally this is fine, but there are two pitfalls to be avoided here.
All this requires is a slight shift of focus to the techniques we use in commercial research. Bear in mind these golden rules, and your charity clients will thank you for it!
Situation
A German start-up assigned IKM with a user analysis of their potential target group. The difficulty: as a start-up the client’s budget was tight, and they could not afford to pay any incentive to participants. Therefore, an alternative to the traditional incentive-based recruiting had to be applied to find respondents willing to participate for free.
Solution / Considerations
Social Media channels such as Facebook were used to recruit potential participants. Social media groups often center on common interests, so the research team joined social groups that potentially could be relevant to the study. An online community platform was used, allowing for full anonymity, and participants could enroll themselves using a link shared on social media.
A few key elements were essential for this kind of recruitment. First of all, establishing relationships based on transparency and trust is key. This would allow them to trust the study and the purpose and open up to the questions. Secondly, participants have to understand the reason for the research and what is expected of them so they can identify with the cause of the study. Thirdly, the participation process has to be kept very simple. The access to the study has to be straight forward and the process has to be as little complex as possible. Furthermore, all questions should be published up front so participants can see all that is expected of them. Asking them to come back for new questions might decrease the rate of participation.
Benefits
The recruitment of non-paid participants takes more time and involvement from the researcher and is more challenging compared to getting incentive-based participants. However, the richness of data from those non-paid participants, without even probing them, was beyond expectations. The ease of use of the platform as well as full transparency for the participants proved key in establishing a relationship of trust.
Overall, participants did not participate for an incentive but to see a change. The answers of these participants were often more detailed, providing comprehensive pictures of specific situations. With an established trust relationship and without a financial motive, the recruited participants were willing to share more honest opinions and deeper insights.
Discussions about what constitutes useful research and insights will probably focus on the role of the research provider’s team, and what they should and should not do. I would, however, like to contend that producing useful research results should be a shared responsibility and requires collaboration between the research and client teams.
“Distributed by the author of the enclosed article with permission from SAMRA”.
Much is heard about Design Thinking and much is discussed of how we, Qualitative Researchers, can use it in our practises as a problem solution methodology to help our clients maximise the potential of their innovation processes and deliver outstanding results. But what is Design Thinking?
How it works
A method for practical, creative resolution of business problems. It’s a form of collective solution-focused thinking with the intent of producing a constructive future result.
The Design Thinking Process can be synthetized in 5 key steps:
Qualitative Research is at the heart of Stages 1 and 5.
The first stage of Design Thinking EMPHATHIZE is the foundation of a human-centered design process. It is about understanding the people for whom we are designing and the key stakeholders in the process.
In Qualitative Researchers words, it’s a hands-on exploratory piece of ethnographic research about our consumers.
To empathize, we need to get everyone involved in the process to:
Watching what consumers do and how they interact with their environment gives us clues about what they think and feel. It helps us to learn about what they need. By watching people we can capture physical manifestations of their experiences, what they do and say. This will allow us to interpret intangible meaning of those experiences in order to uncover insights. These insights will lead you to the innovative solutions. The best solutions come out of the best insights into human behavior.
But we need to learn to see things “with a fresh set of eyes” – tools for empathy, along with a human-centered mindset, is what gives us those new eyes.
This can be done by sending all team members of the process to conduct in-home ethnographic interviews, interact with consumers in an online ethnographic Study or via observation trip to the key consumption points of our target, getting everyone in the research team spending a day living our consumers lives.
Once we’ve collected all our in-depth observation and in-depth knowledge about our target, we’ll move into Stage 2, which is Define.
In the Define Stage we’ll share, unpack and synthesize the hundreds of findings of the field day into compelling needs and insights which we’ll then translate into problem statements.
It’s a stage of the process where we organise all the information and focus on what’s relevant to our overall business problem.
In practical terms, this will be a half a day session with the key stakeholders in the process, where all Download all the observations and findings from the emphasize phase, synthetize them and convert them into problem statements.
During this stage, we set clear tasks to the workshop participants, by convert all their relevant observations and findings into meaningful post its, one post it per finding, including the source.
We’ll then get everyone to post their many post-its in the wall and present them back to the audience. These post-its will then be groups into relevant themes, to then be translated into problem statements to be solved.
Once problem statements have been prioritized, it’s time to move to the Stage 3 of the process, which is Ideation, the mode of the design process where we aim to generate radical design alternatives. This usually takes about half a day.
Mentally it represents a process of “going wide” in terms of concepts and outcomes—it is a mode of “flaring” rather than “focus.” The goal of ideation is to explore a wide solution space – both a large quantity of ideas and a diversity among those ideas.
From this vast depository of ideas we will build prototypes to test.
We ideate in order to transition from identifying problems into solutions.
Once we have prioritised the best solutions, it’s time to move to Stage 4 of the process – Prototype.
Prototyping is getting ideas and explorations out of your head and into the physical world. A prototype can be anything that takes a physical form – be it a wall of post-it notes, a role-playing activity, a space, an object, an illustration, an interface, or even a storyboard.
Prototypes are most successful when people (the design team, the consumer and others) can experience and interact with them. What we learn from those interactions can help us drive deeper empathy, as well as shape successful solutions.
Once we have strong prototypes developed, it’s then time to do what we, Qualitative Researchers, do so often – test creative solutions.
Considerations
Testing with consumers is a fundamental part of a human-centered design approach. We test with users to refine the solution and also to get deeper understanding of the people for whom we are designing.
When we test prototypes we should consider both their feedback on our solution and use the opportunity to gain more empathy. We are back in a learning and empathy mode when we engage users with a prototype.
