Quality teamwork

The compactness of qualitative research has been with us for so long that we take it for granted. A solitary practitioner can sample a population thanks to a fieldwork company and then run the project in a linear fashion from proposal to debrief, most projects being small enough to fit inside a single mind.

Unthinking persistence

If it weren't for this, qualitative research would not be the cottage industry it is. Sole practitioners wouldn't tender against international agencies — which they do. It suits us. Yet whenever a market suits suppliers they will persist long after the practice ceases to be relevant or competitive. I think we have got to that point. We take for granted our intermediary status. Today's marketers, however, have access to data which hasn't come from a research intermediary and have more customer contact than fieldwork companies have ever delivered. Customers — not all, but enough — are taking the plunge and are willing to collaborate and to cocreate. So what's an intermediary to do now?

Our greatest added value, analysis and interpretation, has always been half hidden. There is now the added risk that clients, in the excitement of getting answers online before they have even properly framed their questions, will tend to believe almost everything they are told, thus undervaluing our contribution.

Analysis and interpretation is the difference between what the client thinks as they get into the taxi after the last group and what they learn subsequently in the debrief presentation. If we persist in analysing in a linear fashion, though, we have to persuade our clients to wait for the added value that takes us time to produce. If we don't then increasingly we will be judged by the instant debrief on the night.

Calling all Canutes

So here's a suggestion to get the Canutes out of their chairs before the incoming tide washes their feet. Consider whether we could apply co-creation and collaboration to the process of analysis and whether five people might be able to do in one day what takes a single person five. We could do this by splitting the task of analysis and interpretation between them, either asking each one to represent a particular audience, or to follow particular themes. For offline research it would require the fieldwork to be transcribed before analysis begins.

The fundamental difference in this approach is twofold. The unit of analysis is thematic instead of the aggregated and nuanced opinions of a discussion group with a particular sample composition. Secondly, it uses a team of analysts where each one has a different perspective and whose analysis is itself a stimulus to the other members of the team as it is debriefed.