The Dark Art of the Telephone Depth Interview
People aren’t very keen on telephone interviews. The phone interview tends to be seen as the (deeply) impoverished relation of the face-to-face interview. There are plenty of obvious negatives: on the phone, you have no eye contact, no body language, and precious little context. It’s true that the lack of visual information is a distinct drawback. There are advantages, though. Personally, I love telephone interviews. They can be direct, freeing, and incredibly stimulating to conduct. People have told me things on the phone that they probably never would in a...
Read MoreThat’s why it’s called ‘research’
A wee rant. I came across this conversation about online communities on Research Live. There is a discussion of the pros and cons of research-based online communities, branded online communities, and right at the end a commenter who says that all this community talk is ridiculous and simply listening to internet buzz (via networks like) Facebook is the way forward. Listen, my children. Many many years ago, I was a wee trainee research manager for a company that did a very boring thing. We made the fragrances that go into washing powders. We did not think this was at all dull. We...
Read MoreCan market researchers have an opinion?
Robert Bain of Research Magazine has a blog post today about the way that business people pick on market research as a way of underlining their modern business credentials. He quotes a piece by Marc Babej, a marketer writing in Forbes magazine who fixes the passing blog reader with a flinty stare and declares: ‘You burned big bucks to collect scads of data. Too bad much of it is meaningless.’ Babej’s article is less a research hatchet job and more about ‘smart’ research investment: after all, he has a proprietary technique up his sleeve. It got me thinking...
Read MoreEarly days in online communities: access and social presence
This is a model of research community socialisation that I developed in a white paper for Virtual Surveys a couple of years ago. I was inspired by two sources: first, the ‘forming, storming, norming, performing’ model of focus group dynamics that all qualitative researchers have drilled into them; and a similar five-step model developed by Gilly Salmon to account for online socialisation in online learning environments. Most of the chat about community moderation skills focuses on the higher level issues of discussion and debate. What I wanted to stress in this model was...
Read MoreThe basic qualitative interviewing kit, part 1
I’m on the road this week, for the first time in a while. Just packing up and sorting through my supplies. My current interview kit is so tiny that I’ve had to invest in a bright stripy pouch from Paperchase in order to stand any change of finding it in the bottom of my bag. What do I have? Olympus digital voice recorder. These are about £60 at the moment, and this dinky little recorder connects to the computer via USB. It takes a single AAA battery (essential spare also pictured). The micrphone on this machine is quite excellent, producing really good sound quality...
Read MoreAre we allowed to talk about downloading?
A few months ago I ran some groups with the usual warm-up of discussing mobile and internet use. The one difference between this and normal practice was that for this project, we rang up the attendees a few days before the groups and had a short conversation with them. The intention was merely to check that the attendees were using the specific services we were researching, but it had some interesting effects in the subsequent sessions. In the focus group, we started off with a nice conversation about Internet habits. I gradually began to notice that people I’d interviewed earlier...
Read MoreManifesto
Some of us find it quite simple to put our real organisations and authentic selves online.
Others - well, let's just say that some of us can't bear to look at our own websites.
My mission is to help you transform your online presence so that other people understand and appreciate what you really have to offer. So that you can achieve what you want - whether that's better engagement, more readers, or more sales.