Hi. Qualitative research is a highly specialized and often underappreciated area of market research. Knowing when to use it to help solve problems can be important to the researcher. People don't usually go to school to become a focus group moderator or a qualitative researcher. However, there are many skills that a qualitative researcher needs to have. Related to that is the in-depth interviewing process or focus group. How does one conduct a consistent objective in-depth interview or focus group? You need to know how to do this. You need to understand it and you need to know how to apply it. In this lesson, I will provide you an overview of qualitative research. After this lesson, you will be able to decide and choose the appropriate methods and tools for your research, whether they're qualitative or quantitative. Let's get started. Remember, in quantitative research surveys are often used to collect data, which will need to be turned into statistics and analyzed. Qualitative research explores thoughts and personal behavior. It is used when not looking for specific answers but rather thoughts, feelings, and opinions. Questions are often open-ended. It helps the client understand how the public feels about their product and how it can be improved. It is especially useful in determining new ideas or concepts or trends or feelings. Many techniques can be used for qualitative research including traditional observation, group discussion and interviews, or focus groups. Added to the mix today is monitoring social media sites which is especially useful with generation such as Millennials or Gen Z. You're doing this research to discover what people think, how they feel about your product or service, and to aid in decision making when improving what exists or developing something new. Focus groups are a common form of qualitative research and are valuable when a researcher wants a free flowing discussion to capture real life data. It can help produce information new to the researcher or client, especially through a group interaction process. A focus group moderator must also have the skills to keep the group focused. There are also many logistics and planning details that a focus group planner or moderator must have. In-depth interviews or one on one interviews is another qualitative research method used to gather information when expert opinions are needed or to learn more about a specific product or service, but independent of group interaction. This technique is used most frequently when surveying business leaders or owners, government leaders or other professionals. Interviews can be face to face but most often are conducted by phone. They can be structured, semi-structured, or unstructured. Although, semi-structured is preferred which allows the interviewer to ask direct questions but also allows the person being interviewed the opportunity to provide personal insights. I look at qualitative research as being an exploratory method of research when you're not ready to quantify things yet at this point, you're not looking at segmentation differences, you're not looking to hang your hat on a specific number. If anything, you're looking to pre-identify ideas, problems, or solutions that could feed into a quantitative process at a later date. Qualitative research also gives you the flexibility for small sample sizes because you're not tracking error margin. You're looking at individual beliefs and behaviors and perceptions and needs here. And you're looking at whether this is going to help inform potentially new directions that could be made or further research that could be done. Qualitative research collects opinions, preferences, and thoughts that may not be quantified yet in the subject's mind or may not be something that can be quantified. If you did a focus group of people in terms of the presidency, the presidential election that happened six months or a year ago, people are going to have a thought in their minds. While you created a structured experiment, you're actually getting a people's values and opinions and building off them. They're not going to have a definitive answer or they may not have a definitive answer or their answer may change, and you're going to look to measure different levels or intensities of beliefs. You may also be trying to measure uncertainties but it's not necessarily something that needs to be quantified. Just because you find a way to quantify something doesn't mean it should be. All of this falls in the realm of qualitative research. Qualitative research can fit in many places in the research plan. Before, after or in tandem with quantitative research. The typical research pathway is to do your secondary and internal research and then you do your qualitative research, because quantitative research requires structure categories of things to firmly measure. Qualitative research is often used as a precursor to more structured data collection methods that would be more quantitative. But, there are times where all of a sudden you've done that quantitative research, you've said, wow, there are a lot of problems here or satisfaction is really really low again among millennials. Then as a result, you need to follow up on that. There's a lot of follow-up tools that help diagnose where this dissatisfaction came from or unbundle where the dissatisfaction came from. Qualitative research is actually a very good tool in this case. So, qualitative research can be used after quantitative research in terms of this process. The key in handling all these different methodologies is that there are different qualities and attributes of the data you're collecting that ultimately drives decision making. But, further compounding this is the element of cost and time. How quickly you do need it and how much are you willing to spend because in each of these methods you're trading off strengths for budget and timing, or you're exposing weaknesses as a result. Given your initial research objective or client problem and now that you've identified the constraints, you can make some choices in terms of a research plan or proposal that's dependent on primary or secondary research or qualitative or quantitative research.
