Keep the lines of communication open
Editor’s note: Pam Goldfarb Liss is founder and big brain at LitBrains - Igniting Ideas!, a Nyack, N.Y., research firm.
A recent Kaiser Family Foundation study says an estimated 90 percent of kids ages eight to 18 spend on average over seven hours a day online. This means that in the U.S., kids in grades three through 12 are currently using the Internet for most of their waking hours not in school.
This generation actively shares its ideas online and is comfortable with being heard in aggregate, making them ideal candidates for market research online. This openness beckons the researcher to help create a safer atmosphere online - something that is important to both the child and their parents.
While conducting online research with kids is a gold mine for our industry, there are still a few rules of the road we need to adhere to as we respect children’s unique privacy rights in the Wild, Wild West that currently exists online. This respect is essential for all researchers because our success hinges on earning the trust of and garnering insights from child respondents and their parents.
As market researchers, we must interpret still-evolving laws (such as the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act [COPPA] in the U.S. and Safe Harbor laws in the U.S. and E.U.) that request marketers to identify the source and purpose of the information provided online. Even though these laws are more tailored to the great number of marketing and sales-oriented gimmicks offered online, market researchers can respect the important lines they are drawing in the online sand by establishing and enforcing these rules in recruiting and communicating throughout an online research project.
These rules are common sense to most, but you’d be surprised how many of us recruiting and conducting research with children don’t take the following simple steps to assure the rights of kids and parents.
Recruit with the personal touch. Use traditional recruiting methods to bring children into your online qualitative projects. This includes making sure to talk to their parents first, and then screening the children who will be participating. When using an established online panel of children, ask how they were originally recruited and if there is an opportunity to communicate the project’s purpose with a parent prior to employing the survey. Your information could be suspect without this process, as the faceless world of online allows for a great many abuses. Recruiting respondents with extra care will give you greater context for the people participating and help understand more deeply what is behind some of the answers. As researchers, it is often the context that provides greater insight than the actual answer.
Get parental permission. Parents must provide handwritten approval for all projects I complete with children - whether in person or online. My permission slips include information about the project scope and an overview of what we will ask of their children. This helps comply with the basic outlines of both the COPPA and Safe Harbor laws.
Encourage mom to participate with the under-12 age group. According to the COPPA laws, children under 13 are a gray area for marketers, in general requiring all online promotional games and programs targeting this age to request parent participation. I encourage the same protocol with children online. The opportunities for market researchers are exciting because mom and child can participate in exercises examining purchase behaviors, decision hierarchies and testing new products together, giving us insights into the parent/child push-pull that occurs naturally when product discussions occur.
Using online tools such as a Webcam interviews, the researcher can talk directly to both mom and child about decision hierarchies or new products as they sit comfortably in their home. Texting with moms and kids in the 10-to-12-year-old age group during a shopping excursion is another great way to examine decision hierarchies or purchase behaviors in context. These can be further refined with hybrid projects that incorporate in-person or online focus groups that divide the moms and child to discuss separately, using the online exercises to prime both groups for very fruitful discussions in the focus group room. Since a hybrid method might use online qualitative tools before an in-person focus group, kids are more comfortable with the subject matter. Using a variety of tools, one can evoke some very exciting input from kids who may have otherwise been shy in a traditional qualitative method interview.
Make ongoing phone calls to check-in. Because kids are very comfortable online, and moms and dads are not, employ a periodic, friendly phone call to check-in and allow respondents to identify any concerns with the exercises or activities. Comfort mom or dad that you are respecting their child’s contributions. This small gesture gives a parent a sigh of relief that the online study their child is participating in has a real person protecting their child on the other end.
Seed the ground for the future. Bring mom or dad into the process with an online solo project or a hybrid mix of online and in-person qualitative and foster a long-term relationship with the brand and the family. If the project started with a concept testing, a brand might work with recruiters and the researcher to keep this online community of children engaged through to new product testing and ad checks. Immersive techniques such as online journaling for category explorations, texting during shopping excursions and cell phone video or photos add to the opportunities to better understand family lifestyles through a kid’s eyes.
Privacy is top-of-mind
Online privacy is certainly top-of-mind these days, and not just in the marketing research realm. Missteps by Facebook and Google have shown parents the importance of staying on top of privacy - their own and that of their children. Facebook changed its privacy settings, which riled parents who were already on edge about what their children are sharing online. It is unclear what legal measures may be taken, but many parents were said to be stopping children’s Facebook pages until they understood the new privacy settings. Google revealed its Big Brother-like abilities to see inside your e-mails and Web transactions. This was an unintended byproduct of Google Maps in Europe mostly and a signal that Google has not put safety measures in place - further evidence that all of us must remain vigilant in managing our own privacy settings.
Guarding privacy settings and installing online security measures like secured wireless networks will be more the norm inside households now, but how it affects market researchers online will be still something to watch. Proactive researchers should make their online tools more personal to get the best from their respondents and avoid being seen as the type of Big Brother-like entity many parents fear.
Need the reassurance
A school principal once told me that the toughest job she had was not working with the kids but “dealing with the parents.” Parents need the reassurance that our research processes are safe and comfortable spaces in which their children can share opinions, be heard and not be exposed to anything unsafe.
In research done more than five years ago, I spoke to girls ages 10 to 17 about online predators. These innocent tweens and teenagers knew the word predator but didn’t understand how it could apply online. This is a scary thought to most parents, who don’t always know everything their child is doing online. Teaching kids about who is safe to talk to online and who is not has been the mission of many advocacy groups. In addition, moms and dads are carefully training their children to understand who they connect with online to ensure they stay safe. These parental fears are genuine and those of us who conduct online research projects must never forget that.
By taking some simple steps like a telephone call to your respondents and their parents or understanding how your child panelists are recruited and communicated to about your research, a market researcher establishes a safety zone that helps reassure nervous parents. The lines of communication with parents when doing an online project should not just be established at the recruiting level; they should also be part of the actual research.
Remember the dangers out there online; respect your child respondent and their parents. The result will most certainly be a more comfortable respondent and better insights with richer context for you and your client.