Marketing Blogs
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by Katie Harrison Nov 3 |
Tell me what you know about qualitative research… in bite size
Marketingmag.com.au welcomes qualitative research expert and valued member of the online marketing and social media community, Katie Harris to the stable of guru bloggers on the site. Katie will be posting fortnightly, answering all of your qualitative research questions. See Katie's author profile for more information. This week's post gives an insightful introduction into qualitative research.
To prepare for my upcoming Marketingmag.com.au series on qualitative research, I headed to the buzzing font of all knowledge and inquiry: the Twitterverse. I wanted to find out what marketers (either by title or accidental) were interested in learning about qualitative research, so I aimed my tweet in that direction.
Many thanks to those who responded (linked to from my blog). I was delighted with the number -- and the quality -- of questions I received. I was also more than a little relieved. Happily, it seems that many of you are interested in finding out more about qualitative research.
The questions fell into several categories: the plan is to cover one category per fortnight as follows:
- What is qualitative research? (today’s post)
- Part 1: How do you do qualitative research? What’s the process?
- Part 2: What’s with the fluffy techniques? (November 19)
- What kind of qualitative research can be done on a tight budget? Can I do my own? (December 3)
- What sample size do you need for a qualitative study? (and other sample considerations) (December 18)
- What can you do about researcher bias, subjectivity, leading questions, etc? (January 14)
- How do you get buy in/explain the value of qualitative research? What’s the ROI on a qualitative project? (January 27)
- What should you look for in a research supplier? What’s the difference between good and bad qualitative research? (February 5)
- What about qualitative research and social media: its applications and its evolution, etc? (February 23)
- Closing insights and discussion on online communities. (March 5)
Today, to get the blog rolling, let’s begin with some definitions.
What is qualitative research?
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of market research: quantitative and qualitative research. Both sit under the umbrella term “market research”, which simply describes the task of gathering information about a market and/or consumers within that market.
Although this series is focused on qualitative research, it’s worth including a brief description of quantitative research here for some context.
Quantitative market research is generally used to measure or quantify a given variable of interest, eg how big a market is, how many people hold a certain attitude, behave in a certain way, like a particular brand, bought product X, etc.
Examples of quantitative research methodologies include most written questionnaires, telephone surveys and online questionnaires. The key output for quantitative market research is statistical data.
Qualitative market research, in comparison, is used to provide understanding. Here, the inquiry is focused on why people hold certain attitudes, why they behave in a certain way, or why like a particular brand or product, etc.
Examples of qualitative research methodologies include focus group discussions and in-depth interviews (more on these to come). The key output for qualitative market research is not statistics: it’s consumer understanding.
So that, in a nutshell, is that. Quantitative asks how many. Qualitative asks how come.
Tune in again on November 19, when I’ll look at how to do qualitative research. I’ll take you through the process, the different approaches, and I’ll give you the lowdown on those seemingly fluffy research techniques.
Many thanks to those of you who asked questions, for a full list please visit here.
If you didn’t get a chance to ask a question, but would like to, click here and send one in.
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Can't wait for more good insight into qualitative research.
Looking forward to the upcoming posts :)
Oh yeah and thanks Katie. :-)
P.S Katies personal blog, Zebra Bites was recently ranked 78 in the latest top 100 Australian marketing blogs. Congrats! Its take a lot of discipline to maintain a blog, let alone two!