An introduction to Qualitative Research for people unfamiliar with this methodology

1. Qualitative Research – what does
this mean?
Tim Healey and Peter Hall
March 2014
Insight Team

2. Introduction
• When we conduct Primary Research as with any
other job, you need to choose the right tool for the
right job.
• So, logic helps us to understand that before we
choose the tool – we need to think about the job we
are being asked to do, else we might bring the wrong
tool when we come to do the job
• In research, the job is grandly referred to as The
Research Question
• This means asking ourselves “what are we trying to
find out”

3. The Research Question
• This might seem obvious, but for people who work in
and manage public services can be very close to the
service they run and sometimes it helps to ask the
obvious question - just what is it that you want to find
out?
• Sometimes this question might come as a bit of a
surprise and cause them to think

4. The Research Question
• Words which people commissioning research might
use in answering this question are
• How many? What? Where? When? (Confirmatory)
• Why do? How? (Exploratory)
• How many leads us towards counting
methods – Quantitative
• Why do leads us to Qualitative
Methods

5. Qualitative Data Types
Data that are not characterized by numbers, and
instead are
• textual,
• visual,
• oral
Focus is on
• stories,
• visual portrayals,
• Meaningful characterisations,
• interpretations,
• and other expressive descriptions.

6. Qualitative Tools
If you have a requirement for analysis of this sort; this sort of research
question and this sort of data, you need a set of research tools which
are designed to find these things out – and they are mostly different
tools than those we would use for quantitative research.
Some of these qualitative tools are a bit wild and whacky for use in
public service – but for the remainder of this presentation, we’re going
to highlight just three
• Focus Groups
• In-depth Interviews
• Textual Analysis

7. Qualitative Tools
Focus Group
Interview
An unstructured,
free-flowing
interview with a
small group of
around six to ten
people.
Focus groups are
led by a trained
moderator who
follows a flexible
format
encouraging
dialogue among
respondents.

8. Qualitative Tools
Focus Group
Interview
http://youtu.be/f3A9g5Eoz2Y
This is fragrance guru Anne
Gottlieb – she’s the person you
get in if you want your product to
smell great.
Here her client is Lynx who are
launching a brand new world
wide bodyspray fragrance - code
name Axe
The final say - yes or no - for the
fragrance she’s been working on
developing for 12 months comes
from a single focus group of
young men from Brazil (37:46)

9. Qualitative Tools
In-Depth
Interviews
• A one-on-one interview between a professional researcher and
a research respondent conducted about some relevant
business or social topic.
• The researcher asks many questions and follows up each
answer with probes for additional elaboration.
• Like focus group moderators, the interviewer’s role is critical in
a depth interview. He or she must be a highly skilled individual
who can encourage the respondent to talk freely without
influencing the direction of the conversation.
• They sound like this
• Not only does the interview have to be conducted, but each
interview produces about the same amount of text as does a
focus group interview. This has to be analysed and interpreted
by the researcher.
• We’ve had some success in engaging the people who
commission the research in the analysis of the transcribed data

10. Qualitative Tools
Textual Analysis
• Both Focus Group and Depth Interviews generate transcriptions
which become the data for further analysis.
• Generally, this process is known as coding – this is a process
for boiling down the wide range of data to distil from it the
essence of the points being made
• Whilst we think of ourselves as unique individuals, social
research over the years has reinforced Pareto’s famous 80:20
maxim – in any community we are usually 80% the same as
other people and only express our individuality 20% of the time
• So, across respondents to interviews and participants in focus
groups 80% of people make very similar points and 20% will be
unique points.
• The knack is to soak yourself in the data, try coding schemes
until you group all of the responses into a number of codes
(smells of flowers, won’t be used by manual workers, smells
sexy etc. 80%) and a set of unique statements (20%)

11. Qualitative Tools
Textual Analysis
• You can use the same approach towards coding free-text entry
data from questionnaires
• Coding in a group can also engage the customer with the data
• You can do this simply using Excel – or there are pieces of
software (called QDA programmes) which automate this
process to an extent

13. Qualitative Tools
Conversations
An informal qualitative data gathering
approach in which the
researcher engages a respondent
in a discussion of the relevant
subject matter.
Free-association
techniques
Record respondents’ first (topof-
head) cognitive reactions to
some stimulus.
Observation
The researcher’s descriptions of
what actually happens in the
field; these notes then become
the text from which meaning is
extracted.
Collages
Business researchers sometimes have
respondents prepare a collage to
represent their experiences.
Projective techniques
An indirect means of questioning
enabling respondents to project
beliefs and feelings onto a third
party, an inanimate object, or a
task situation.

14. Summary

15. http://www.cengage.com/marketing/book_content/1439080674_zikmund/book/ch07.pdf