Claudia Parvanta on "Qualitative Research"

...for me qualitative research is really anything that you’re not going to try to project to a large population. You’re pretty much trying to understand a particular group of people. It might be a particular audience segment. You want to have a range of the ideas. You’re not so interested in generalizing that back out to an entire population. So it’s not really the method so much as your intention that distinguishes qualitative research from quantitative research.

…to go into depth about it, you’re really looking for usually meaning as opposed to the “what”, and you know you’re not looking for facts. You’re looking at the attitudes and understandings that underlie those facts. So, for example, if you know that nine out of ten dentists recommend this gum, what you’re going to use your qualitative research for is to find out why they recommend the gum. It’s really you can use qualitative research before or after you’ve done some of your quantitative work. Sometimes you use it to help you develop a quantitative instrument. Sometimes you use it to try to figure out why did you get those answers that you got. But it’s really a search for meaning that is, that you use qualitative methods for.

There is a range of methods that you can use that are all qualitative that we use to sort of figure out how our intended user will either use a product or service and how they feel about it. And we tend to use things -- we might call them situational or environmental kinds of methods, which when you’re going into a place, you yourself, the researcher, and you’re trying to get as close as you can into the shoes of that person, so sometimes we’ll go into their homes -- a lot of this comes from the private sector. You know, the detergent companies have done a ton of this where they watch how do women wash dishes and they ask them questions while they’re washing the dishes themselves. Or they sit there at the breakfast table and watch a mom, you know, as she’s smearing butter on the toast for her kids, how is she preparing it. Really trying to get a sense of how is our product going to be used in the actual location? And so it’s very observational, and if the participant is willing, you know, you sit there and you’re chit-chatting with them and you’re asking them questions. So those are sort of situations where you’re actually going onsite in the real location, in real time, observing and asking questions. I would contrast to what I would call more audience research, which is where I’m basically just talking to you. But we’re sitting someplace else that’s probably some kind of a facility that you’ve rented for the day. And I’m asking you questions about it, but we’re not really in the same moment in your life looking at it from your perspective as it actually happens. If you’re really working on an actual product or service, the environmental situation is without equal because people tend to give you an ideal situation when they’re speaking about it.

And a lot of us learned from some of the early research we used to do internationally -- and even if you just thought about something simple like washing your hands, we found out how complex that could be, how many steps were involved, how many resources you needed; but if you asked someone to sit around and talk to you about how do they wash their hands, unless they’re really, you know, so thorough in thinking about it, they usually will forget quite a bit of what they have to go through.

…when you’re doing audience research and you’re going to do more this kind of asking them questions, you have an opportunity of working with one person by themselves -- we call that an in-depth interview -- versus a group, a focus group interview. Very often we might confuse, you know, when’s the right time to use either one, and we tend to say we’re going to use in-depth interviews -- well, first of all, if you really were talking to someone we consider a gatekeeper or some other kind of an expert intermediary, and so we want to ask them a lot of things and you just want to get their opinion on it. If it also is a sensitive topic, they might be embarrassed to speak about it in front of others, or you think that there’s a high likelihood that they might, I don’t want to say lie, but they might lie about, you know, what they’re going to tell you if they have to do it in front of other people. So, very often we would choose an in-depth because you’re going to get a lot of information or it’s mostly for the privacy. Focus groups, often people don’t take advantage of the group dynamic and they kind of ask them more like a group of individual interviews. They’ll say, “So, what do you think? What do you think? What do you think?” And we’ve always talked about that not being a very effective way to do a focus group; the best moderators really do let the group speak to each other and learn when to cut that off and when to bring in the next question. But you’ll see that, you know, members of the group can actually take the topic a lot further than maybe you should do as the moderator.

I’ve gone through a lot of experiences trying to identify people who make good moderators. The best moderator is actually someone that you’d want to talk to, and this is often not someone who’s a professional anything necessarily. Of course, we hire professional moderators all the time, but if you’re working in a setting where you have people who deal with the public a lot -- they might be answering your phones, they might be a receptionist -- very often those people have the “people skills” that you’re looking for. They make wonderful focus group moderators because the first thing we say is, “I’m not an expert in this subject. I really want to hear what your opinion is.” And it takes someone who can play a bit self-effacing. And also I always say you’ve got to play a little bit dumb and you have to say ten times, “I don’t understand what you mean. Can you go into more depth on that?” Even though you probably do understand what that person means, but you want to hear them say it and you want to hear the others say it. So, you know, people who are good hostesses or hosts at dinner parties, these are the kinds of skills that you want. And I say you use all those same social skills to bring out your reluctant people and to kind of try to quiet down the ones who are speaking too much. Now there are some, you know, there’s a whole list of do’s and don’ts and tips, and the best resource that I think you can find for that is that -- especially a kit that was put out by the Academy for Educational Development; and it includes a book called “Handbook for Excellence in Focus Groups” and that was originally written by Mary Deavis - and there’s also I believe a manual and a video that gives you a lot of suggestions for how to sort of, you know, handle the dynamics of the group to keep things going and quiet down the guy who just won’t stop talking and that sort of thing.

I have two things that I love to do in focus groups, and sometimes this works better when you’re at kind of a testing phase, or you can also do it in the very beginning phase. I like to use, I guess they call them projector techniques, and I’ll show a picture. You can almost pick up any picture out of any magazine, and I’m telling you, like you know that saying “everything I learned, I learned in kindergarten,” I think I learned this one in first grade. You know, the teacher would give you a picture from a magazine and tell you to write a story about it. And you can do the same kind of thing in a focus group. Just get people to make up a story, and you bring in a picture or a drawing of something that you’re interested in. Very often I’ll ask people to make up a soap opera about a character and this is the dilemma that they have, and what I’ll ask them to do is not just make it up and tell a narrative but I’ll ask the members of the focus group to act it out. So the one thing I’ll with the projector technique is bring in a picture and ask some questions about the person in the picture, so they are projecting onto the picture. And then we get to a point of saying, “Well, what would she do now? What would she say to her son? What would she say to her boyfriend?” And by the way, “Don’t tell me. Let’s see it. You be something. You be something. Act it out.” And then we get into a role play situation. Both of those techniques -- one, to break it up and make people sort of pay more attention; two, to take away the emphasis from you the individual who’s answering, and yet I think that tend to convey more honesty than if I’m saying, “Well, what do you think most people think about this?” -- because that’s another technique to use. So I might as well say, “What do you think your best friend would say about this?” but then people really think about their best friend; maybe their best friend has a completely different opinion than they do. So I found sort of showing pictures and letting them project into pictures or role playing to be two techniques that I like to bring into focus groups. What I don’t like to do is, you know, really make people think hard about questions. The questions have to be very easy in a focus group. If they get too complex, everyone sits there and sort of studies and tries to think about it, and it really slows down your group a lot.

I want to talk about something else besides focus groups though because I think that for marketing research, of course, some of them must have had the stuff is mall intercept interviews, which are like quick, in-depth interviews. I mean, you grab one person and you’re talking to them. You know, central location intercepts can be done in a cornfield. You know? They can be done anywhere. It’s just basically again…it’s a little bit of a cross between the audience interview method and the environmental method, because you’re sort of going someplace where the people are and you’re speaking to them briefly. But in some way you’re relating to it. There’s an awful lot of work that can be done in supermarkets around the products that are being sold, you know, going to facilities. If you want to know why are some people physically active, go to the places where they are and find out what they’re doing as much as the folks who aren’t doing it. So there’s just a lot of sort of going to where the activity is, where what the behavior that you want to see happens, and speaking to the people who are doing it.

The usual pet peeve people talk about is when people take qualitative research and try to generalize from it. So, you know, for example, if I did four focus groups and I went, “Hey, 80% of my participants said blah-blah-blah.” And that’s, I think everyone knows that’s a no-no. My own pet peeve is because I feel that if you have the opportunity to have eight people sit down and talk to you for two hours and you don’t engage them enough to give your creative team something to work with, you’ve really wasted that opportunity. And I feel that focus groups are a tool for the creative process, so you want to be able to have real people talking. You want to hear their voices -- and I don’t mean just literally give the tape or give the transcript -- I mean you really want to get inside of them and you want to have them speaking in a way that someone who has a creative background is inspired.

And not just the why once or twice, but really let people hear it. And so, for example, going back against some of the research I used to do in other countries, we would have our research report, but we certainly would share the transcripts if not the actual tapes with our creative team because they would just about create the spot or the message right from what they heard on that tape because they could hear tone in the woman’s voice or how this man was describing something. And, you know, it’s hard to explain the creative process, but it inspired them as opposed to just informed them.