Qualitative research: Now and in the future

Editor's note: Katharina Ladikas is senior project director and Edward Appleton is director global marketing and sales at research firm Happy Thinking People.

More than 18 months have passed since qualitative researchers in Europe were forced by the first wave of the pandemic to go fully digital, to switch from face-to-face (F2F) to digital in core approaches – focus groups and in-depth interviews.

The responses have been overall very positive – “no way back” is how the editor-in-chief of German marketing research publication Planung & Analyse described it in a recent issue focusing on qualitative research. Digital qual definitely works, delivering extremely well on all sorts of insights briefs, such as getting depth insights digitally, assessing emotions and understanding people’s reactions.

In this article, we look forward – and look back. Our assumption: that future forecasting is best done by fully understanding the present and recent past, looking at overall dynamics and early trends.

Following this principle, we start by reviewing the past several months and ask: What’s changed since we first talked about digital qual and online empathy in our company’s May 2020 webinar? Secondly, we look at emerging trends – aspects of qualitative that are establishing themselves as part of the new best-practice normal. Finally, based on the first two sections we share our vision of how the future qualitative landscape might look and what that might mean for future insight-generation.

Digital qual: new ground rules

The switch in qualitative research accelerated by the pandemic brought many changes, most notably a shift to doing group discussions and in-depth interviews digitally.

As with any change in data collection mode, the transfer of good practice from face-to-face was a hugely valuable baseline but much adapting and adjusting was required, with some reinvention necessary. Digital has its own rules.

In the following we look briefly at the most fundamental areas of change: length and size of group discussions; different moderation approaches and participant engagement strategies; and the breaking down of geographical barriers, both in-country and internationally.

Shorter and smaller. The most basic change in the switch to screen-to-screen groups was in the length and size of the discussion. While face-to-face groups would often comprise up to eight participants and invariably last for about two hours, digital has forced a rethink to shorter and smaller. After all, online has its own rules in terms of time and space; digital attention spans can be short, distractions abound.

Four to five participants is optimal, six at the most to ensure proper engagement and in-depth responses, a good discussion flow and smooth interaction between participants. In terms of duration, 90 minutes works well. Beyond that, different engagement approaches are needed.

Online co-creation tasks can be effective for up to two-and-a-half hours – the moderator has to shape the session to keep people energized and involved. Breaking it down into smaller sessions – “chunking” – works well, as do breakout sessions with smaller groups. Introducing short breaks and even doing simple invigorating exercises also helps.

Stimulus that really stimulates. That leads to the second important point: the need to involve participants more and differently. Stimulus material in whatever form needs to be more involving – stimulating, as the word suggests.

Digital has shortened our attention spans and ability to concentrate and setting tasks is one way of countering this, keeping people engaged – getting participants doing things, setting homework, punctuating sessions with mini-tasks during sessions with precise instructions.

The moderator’s changing role. For moderators, digital empathy requires a different approach, even more attentive and responsive. With F2F, it’s easier to create atmosphere, make people smile; digitally that’s trickier as people engage differently. Moderators need, for example, to exaggerate – to look skeptical longer or to really adopt a facial expression that is encouraging in a very clear manner, in a way that in real life wouldn’t be necessary or would seem odd. 

There’s also the challenge of managing people who repeatedly want to be the first to answer. With F2F it’s easy to use body language and verbal cues to subtly make the point that all views need to be heard. Digitally, it’s more challenging; things need to be more direct in the interests of clarity. This can easily – irrespective of cultural preferences – lead to people feeling slightly offended and then going into a hidden sulk, which the moderator then needs to manage.

The more, the merrier? Digital has significantly extended qual’s audience reach. All sorts of people are now involved in in-depth insights generation that were previously off the recruitment map.

Geography and distance play much lesser roles. Participants and clients don’t have to make time to come to a central location, meaning rural or remote audiences can be involved more easily, allowing for a better geographic dispersion. Time slots are more flexible. Lunch breaks, for example, can now be dedicated to a qual session from one’s computer at home or at work. This has opened up whole new B2B audiences.

If a client needs to take regionality into account, it’s also possible to involve people from different regions in one country in the same group.

International projects have perhaps changed the most. It’s now possible to cover far-flung geographies in different time zones more conveniently – say, groups in Tokyo in the morning, London in the afternoon and Houston in the evening. “No travel required” means savings in time and hotel and airfare costs along with eco-efficiencies and freedom from jet lag.

There are many more changes than we have space to discuss here but in summary, the switch to full digital has been hugely empowering for qualitative research. It has caught up to other sections of the MR industry that went fully digital much earlier. It has become nimbler and more cost-effective with no loss of depth.

Evolving protocols and practices

Next let’s look at trends – areas of digital qual where protocols and best practice principles are still emerging.

The shift to fully digital in qual has been less abrupt thanks to experience gained over many years with tools such as online insight communities and digital ethnographies. Most moderators are comfortable with online research tools and techniques but doing things in real time (as opposed to asynchronous tasks set in online communities, for example) has created new learnings and challenges.

Here’s a short list of some typical qual tasks and our observations and takeaways from recent project work.

• Digital brand mapping. Drag-and-drop functions are so flexible that people can correct and ponder while actually thinking about what they feel, what they want to say. A bit more System 1, faster, more intuitive.
• Positioning exercises, competitive mapping, brand-stretching tasks. Digital tasks are super easy, pulling tiles from A to B with the mouse. This makes all sorts of positioning and brand exercises work smoothly, where participants are challenged, for example, to say which brands are the best fit for a number of consumer segments.
• Picture sorts. People have great fun uploading, sorting. Asking participants to explore the thinking behind the groupings is really concrete and results in broad, insights-rich feedback. Done digitally, the task becomes close to a co-creation exercise, as people do things at the same time as they’re thinking.
• Integration of quant tasks/quick polls. Moving between rating or ranking to in-depth exploration has become much easier. Software often helps gamify, offering visuals, fun elements, smilies, etc., plus real-time presentation of results. This allows researchers to take quick temperature checks and react accordingly – an agility which was more challenging with face-to-face.
• Shopper insights. Digital shop-alongs hold up well so far in our equivalence assessments against F2F. Participants are tasked to go shopping, we accompany them digitally and participator and moderator actually experience things at the same time. Compared to face-to-face, it’s easier and more convenient to execute when done digitally, more flexible to organize and with slightly lower costs.
• In-home usage tests (IHUTs). We have been pleasantly surprised by how feasible IHUTs have proven to be. Product samples are dispatched, opened and tried right in the middle of the online groups – evaluated individually in people’s own homes, all at the same time. This digital immediacy allows a broad range of client-side stakeholders to witness the emotions participants undergo in real time and pose specific questions, via the moderator, if needed.

There are many more areas – projective techniques work well digitally, for example, as do ethnographies (we have a great case study on digital ethnographies; if you’re interested, please get in touch) – but in the interest of time we will move on.

Frontline observations. When shaping digital qual approaches to address insight needs, we always monitor the changing landscape, both technologically and in participants’ behaviors. Both are moving fast – many of us have spent more time than we anticipated online over the past 18 months of on-off lockdown.

Here are some of our observations from the front line of digital qual during that time period. 

Digital confidence is increasing across all age groups – unsurprisingly, as the pandemic has forced us to become Zoom power-users. Tasks such as logging in, using key functionalities and un-muting require less and less practice time prior to an online group.

This confidence occasionally results in a different challenge: participants thinking they know Zoom inside and out, not bothering to do the setup test and ending up not being able to participate or connect their headphones, dropping in a little late, etc.

Sometimes respondents are too relaxed. They’re more in lean-back rather than lean-forward mode. For the moderator this poses a diplomatic challenge: Asking someone to open their own bedroom window isn’t as easy as doing it yourself in a studio context.

We also notice changes in people’s habits on their digital background choices. The bonus ethno insights that digital delivered seem to be falling away. About a year ago, researchers often got a free mini-glimpse into people’s homes, allowing us to see personal stuff in the background, but now more and more people are choosing a backdrop (a palm tree, a beach, outer space) or blurring their background.

Tech as a facilitator instead of a barrier. While most of the technology used in digital qual likely isn’t particularly new to experts in IT, it’s key to how digital qual has taken off and gained broader acceptance, penetrating into more and more divisions of research-buying companies. Client participation has become much easier (and cheaper) – they can just log in from their laptops wherever and whenever. Involving key stakeholders outside the insights department is much easier, requiring nothing more than sharing an invite link.

However, the commitment levels of logging into a session are so much lower than, say, booking time to travel to a central location and thus these slots are more in danger of being bumped or de-prioritized – a watch-out for anyone interested in helping extend the reach of consumer closeness across the organization. Nevertheless, we have definitely seen more R&D staff joining at the end of a session digitally over the past 12 months and they seem to love it. For the activation phase of innovation projects this has been extremely valuable.

Once clients are involved and plugged in, there is still a need for them to be reminded of the rules of engagement: how to use the chat function, mute/unmute, “hide” themselves, etc. It certainly helps for smoother sessions if clients don’t suddenly pop up unexpectedly in the screen, with their faces and names and even the company name visible. This still happens.

Managing the feedback culture from clients is another evolving task – getting chat notes from individual clients is a challenge. Ideally one client-side person collates all client feedback and then passes it on to the moderator. We see improvements over time but this is still an issue.

New tasks – what value? Switching to the moderator and agency perspective, digital also involves new tasks – sending out all the links to the right people, ensuring nobody gets left off, getting GDPR consent forms done, potentially managing an online translator in parallel, for example. All are critical tasks but are often not visible to those outside the process. If these nitty-gritty jobs reside with the moderator – as can often happen – there is a danger of overburdening with a new sort of admin complexity. New roles are perhaps required within research organizations.

And there are still technical challenges that have nothing to do with operational efficiency and are difficult to anticipate. WLAN gaps happening in the middle of sharing a TV commercial, for example, or people dropping in and out due to technical bugs. These things are all disruptive, particularly live, but the show must go on. For the moderator this means learning to keep your cool and being able to improvise if unexpected things happen – above and beyond a cat (or something even more exciting!) walking into the picture.

Time to think? Finally, there is the aspect of everybody increasingly spending more and more time in front of the computer, clients and moderators alike. Days packed with back-to-back online meeting after meeting, with zero gaps in between, can certainly boost efficiency but that digital overload and excessive multitasking can lead to mistakes and burnout. Or simply not having enough time to sit back and sift through one’s impressions, letting the jigsaw pieces of the insights puzzle fall into place.

This digital world contrasts for many moderators with their past experiences, memories of doing F2F work, getting on a plane or train, relaxing a bit during the journey, the rituals of grabbing a sandwich and coffee, plopping down in a hotel room late at night. These are largely gone. Some qual practitioners miss this – others are more grateful for the efficiencies digital offers.

The future

What does the future hold for qual, digitally empowered as it is? Crystal ball-gazing is often fun but much is characterized by uncertainty – witness COVID-19 mid-2019. There are clear megatrends – further digital transformation and AI, sustainability, etc. – that will continue to impact the qualitative practice but to say with confidence exactly how and where is near impossible.

Pragmatically, and based on our industry knowledge and observations, plus discussions with clients across numerous categories and geographies, we have identified a few key areas and issues that we believe will likely characterize the development of qual in the next two to three years.

Face-to-face. Digital is here to stay but it will coexist with F2F. As COVID-19 recedes, the decision on which mode or, more likely, which method mix to choose will be driven by the calculation of what’s best for a specific brief. Digital has proven itself in so many areas but for some briefs there is no substitute for actually being there. Projects where the touch-and-feel aspect is so important, for example, or where we have to work with mockups that can’t easily be sent to participants’ homes. Also projects where sensory aspects such as weight or sound are key. Or for geographies where neither client nor agency has an adequate understanding of the culture and context. We still believe in such circumstances the added value of face-to-face will justify additional costs and travel.

If we were to risk a prediction – perhaps a wish – for the future it would be two-thirds digital one-third face-to-face. For certain tasks relating to creativity and innovation we think face-to-face may have unique advantages. Yes, digital software such as Mural has proved hugely useful and empowering in times of lockdown for innovation challenges. Most (if not all) of the principles of co-creation best practice (e.g., smaller groups, a sense of urgency and competition, time-boxing) work equally well online. However, there is an argument – driven by positive pre-pandemic F2F experiences and outputs – that physical presence and hands-on sessions are wonderful for stimulating creativity. Inspiring off-site locations definitely create a different environment that engenders different thinking and new mental approaches, with invariably rich outputs. The physical handling of prototypes also has benefits – sometimes we think with our body (in this case hands), not just our brains or eyes.

We see technology continuing to play a central role, especially given the backdrop of more people working from home (WFH). This is likely to stay with us – however many days that may be per week or month. As qual data sets (often huge digital files) become larger and larger, the online WFH transfer options – bandwidth – need to be smooth to ensure downloads can be done faster, especially from home offices. IT investments and upgrades will be necessary.

Understanding people. In qual, the human factor will remain central in making sense of stuff; the stories people tell us and the emotions they contain, subtle or obvious, hidden or on the surface.

The basics of qual – talking to people, interpreting the gap between what people do and what they say – will likely remain; interpreting that dynamic is the business of experts, human qualitative researchers. Insight-generation isn’t done by the press of a button – yet. We look forward to the time, hopefully soon, where analysis processes can be truly simplified with the help of automation software, allowing researchers to get to the core tasks of drawing conclusions, advising strategically based on category knowledge and spending less time on low-level stuff like searching large data sets of videos for a quote or checking what was said exactly in a language (or dialect) one doesn’t understand.

We monitor the accuracy and value of software tools constantly. Our prediction is that video in particular will play a larger role in how participants interact with researchers in future, over time supplanting the primacy of the written word. Analyzing the outputs in a cost-effective manner is one of the challenges where AI will hopefully help in the future.

The metaverse. While AI and how it works in practice currently dominates many MR qual discussions, there are other things cooking in the tech world, such as virtual reality/augmented reality and of course metaverse applications. 

The metaverse is shaping up as the next big tech frontier and will likely impact entertainment, education, health care and also market research. Applications will provide a much more immersive digital option than current 2D screens. They will be particularly relevant for design testing and add a whole new social component, exploring not just new environments but also interacting with others. The potential for impact on qual explorations is huge.

Dealing with larger and different types of data sets is also an area we see as the future of qual. This means adding to the existing specialisms of social science, behavioral and psychological understanding an array of new adjacent disciplines: neuroscientific approaches or biometrics such as eye-tracking; working with specialisms such as advanced semiotics or applying a specific lens to analysis such as behavioral economics. And of course, integrating quant with qual will be a continuing trend. Thus, training and retraining will be core to future upskilling.

And who knows, maybe the qual specialist agency won’t be known as such but rather as a strategic solution provider or strategic consultant/coach. Methods will become secondary to the ability to deliver solutions, advise strategically and handle all sorts of data with numerous approaches toward the ultimate goal of providing actionable insights.

Changes on the client side are of course a constant and probably overall the key driver. We read a lot about in-sourcing and DIY. For qual, this is definitely an area we see growing. With certain projects we train clients in the basics of interviewing good practice, how to ask questions, to avoid bias, for example, so they can do their own exploratories or mini-immersions. How often this actually happens, given the hectic schedules and full agendas of many clients, is open to question.

We equally see a growth in secondary research briefs, clients asking us to help them with meta-analyses, evaluating and summarizing knowledge from existing data banks – again, despite the possibility of software existing to help with such tasks. The human intelligence brought to bear on a strategic challenge, to distil and recommend appears to remain critical and highly valued.

Finally, the major shift on the client side is (of course) digital transformation. Whole departments are being created, whole company cultures and processes are changing rapidly. This will continue to impact the type of briefs qual agencies receive – more and more new digital formats, likely ever shorter.

And during times of uncertainty, the need to understand changes in how consumers want to shop, the so-called decision journey, what the interplay is between digital options and face-to-face, will remain high. Analytics can be powerful but if people’s behaviors shift, then the assumptions underpinning a model need fresh data. Cue hypothesis generation, cue qual research.

Remains exciting

There is a lot more to say and explore. But we will pause – in the hope that you have followed us to the end. The future of qualitative research, both digital and analog, remains exciting and we believe digitally enabled qual will play a huge part in it.