Lecture 9: Collecting and analysing Qualitative Data Flashcards
What are the advantages of focus groups?
- Relatively easy (not in a B2B context)
- Speed
- Comments from participants trigger responses from others
- Participants may feel more motivated to express their views without feeling they are being ‘interviewed’
- Produce rich data
- Good forum for generating ideas as opposed to simply examining them
What are the disadvantages of focus groups?
- Can be expensive
- Results are not representative to the population hence you can not generalize
- Large groups make interaction difficult
- Small groups are dominated by a few ‘Alpha’s’
- Embarrassment - Difficult to carry out when the issue is private or sensitive
- Possible conflict / Reactions to other respondents
- Reactions to the moderator
What are the agreed steps to conduct a focus group from the literature?
- Focus group has between 6-8 participants
- Requires a skilled moderator & assistant moderator
- Lasts between 1 and 2 hours
- Has a discussion guide to keep both the moderator and participants on track
- Held in a quiet area where there will be no interruptions.
- Collect data via recording (audio & visual)
What are some qualitative research methods?
- In-depth interviews
- Focus Groups
- Case Studies
- Observation approaches
- experimental research
- projective techniques
What is the shared strength and weakness of qualitative research?
The human element of qualitative inquiry is both its strength and weakness
- Its Strength is fully using human insight and experience
- Its Weakness is being dependent on the researcher’s skill, training, intellect, discipline, and creativity
What are the 4 areas of Qualitative research
- Exploratory research
- New Product Development (NPD)
- Tactical Studies
- Creative Development
What is the definition of exploratory research
Look at the broader environment (both at the macro- and the micro-level) and understand emerging trends
– Existing markets because … things change!
– New markets because … business change!
Describe what NPD encompasses.
New products:
– New to the world (major innovations)
– New to the company
– Redesigned and improved
Describe how Qual research helps Major innoavtions.
Qual research can help spot trends or find gaps that a new technology can fill (or do so better than an existing technology)
Describe how Qual research helps New Product development for the company
: Qual research will help to understand consumer behaviour, consumers’ perceived value from competitors’ products and guide the development of the company’s product
Describe how Qual research helps redesigning and improving with regards to NPD
Help understand the problems customers have with the company’s product and guide the direction to solve them.
Describe the Creative Development area of qual research
Assisting in development of messages and execution of advertising and promotional activities
Explain Tactical Qualitative studies
- Pack design alternatives
- Press advertising – alternative headlines
- Casting –
- Product formulation
- Positioning alternatives
- Package dispensing alternative
- Executional options – do consumers notice changes in pack design, logo, voice-over etc.
What are the results when Qual research is best used?
- Increase in understanding & gives meaning
- Expands knowledge
- Clarifies the real issue
- Generates hypotheses for quantitative investigation
- Identifies a range of behaviours
- Explores/explains consumer motivations/attitudes/behaviour
- Identifies potential distinct behavioural groups
What are some activities of focus groups
– Producing lists (Bernard, 1995)
– Ranking in order of most/least liked (Bernard, 1995)
– Choose among alternatives (Krueger & Casey, 2000)
– Brand association / word generation (Bulmer, 1998)
– Brand mapping / positioning (Wilson, 2012).
How can moderators find success with Focus Groups
- Kindness with firmness
- Permissiveness
- Involvement
- Incomplete understanding
- Encouragement
- Flexibility
- Sensitivity
Define an in-depth interview
- Interviews that are conducted face to face
- In which the subject matter of the interview is
explored in detail using an interview guide
In-Depth interviews are?
- Used to develop a deeper understanding of
consumer attitudes and the reasons behind specific
behaviours. - Achieved through responding to an individual’s
comments with extensive probing. - Flexible but also evolutionary in nature.
When should you use in-depth interviews?
- When the situation under discussion holds the
potential to be embarrassing, to be stressful or
confidential - Where a detailed analysis of a complex situation
needs to be undertaken - Where peer pressure may cause some respondents
to act atypically (lie to avoid disgrace) - Where the interviewer needs to gain a progressive
set of images of a decision process - In novel, complex situations where the prime
intention is to explore rather than measure
What are the different types of in-depth
interviews & Choice
- Direct questioning:
- Indirect questioning:
- Structured Guide:
- Unstructured Guide:
Advantages of In-depth Interviews?
- Great depth & richness of data
- Can ascribe directly responses
to an individual - Ability to develop close
rapport/trust improving the
validity and reliability of the
data - Lack of overt peer pressure to
conform to social norms etc.
Allows for the expression of
non-conformity without
sanctions
Disadvantages of In-depth interviews?
- Costly in terms of time/money
and in terms of analysis - Needs skilled interviewers (hard
to find) - Can only work with a small
sample; therefore ability to
generalise limited - Because of subjectivity, difficult
to compare results of one
interviewer with those of others - Subjectivity: The interviewer IS
the data generator; Data
variation among interviewees
may well be the outcome of
using different interviewers in
the same project
Critiques of Qualitative Research?
- Sample size is too small - breadth versus depth
- Cannot generalise your findings
- Research may be subjective, influencing data
collected and what emerges from the analysis. - Data can be dependent on the skills of the
interviewer - Research does not produce true & measurable
facts
How to avoid criticism when using Qualitative Research?
- The data collection methods should be systematic, transparent
and well justified. - You may choose to go for a really large sample! (e.g. a tastetesting may involve hundreds of participants)
- Provide explicit accounts of steps taken to ensure accuracy
- Triangulation across sources or methods
- Make sure you are consistent in data collection across informants
