But this doesn't mean that qualitative research is thereby less scientific than quantitative methodologies. In fact, I would argue that there is a rigor proper to qualitative research, and it is this rigor that makes qualitative research every bit as "sciency" as any quant study.

So what is the rigor proper to qualitative?

Before a set of focus groups or one-on-one interviews takes place, decisions that are made about the screening of respondents can determine whether the findings of the research are trustworthy or of dubious value. If, for example, a focus group recruiter is permitted to prompt a prospective respondent into answering a question in a way that increases the likelihood of eligibility for the study in question-- and there is sometime a subtle pressure to do this in low-incidence recruits-- the result will be a group of respondents who aren't at all the people my client needs to hear from. This is why identifying the best research facilities market-by-market and supervising the recruit with razor-sharp attention to detail is absolutely essential to a good outcome.

While the research is in the field, managing back room perceptions of the research and gently helping client-side observers not to let an individual comment or an individual group to skew their perception of the whole is one of the most important-- and difficult!-- expressions of methodological rigor proper to qualitative research. This is one reason (with apologies to FocusVision) that I am not the biggest fan of remote viewing. Unless an observer is committed to watch a focus group via teleconference with the same degree of attention they might watch while sitting behind the two-way mirror (bowl of M&Ms included), and unless an observer has the ability to watch most or all of the groups in a series, the likelihood is great that the remote observer will miss some of the important patterns that only emerge over time or mistake the words of an individual respondent who is both voluble and charismatic as the opinion of the entire cohort. This is when the researcher needs gently to remember for herself-- and remind the observers and stakeholders-- that no individual respondent, no single group, speaks for everyone. The "truth" of qualitative emerges only from calm reflection on hours of discussion, not from a narrow focus on individual sound bites.

And then there's what happens after the field work is done: The rigor appropriate to analysis and reporting. Typically, my team and I will generate a quick "topline" report of findings from qualitative research within a couple of days of the fieldwork. The exercise is not only mandatory from a client perspective (busy executives often want to know "the top-three take-aways" as quickly as possible), but actually quite useful from a methodological perspective. A philosophy professor of mine used to say, "A thought isn't thunk until it's been spoken." With apologies to grammarians everywhere, his point was simply that we generally don't know what we think about a given situation until we've actually tried to articulate our thought. Topline reports are the qualitative researcher's first formal effort to articulate what was learned in the field and, as such, form an important part of the analytic process.

I always assume that's all my clients really want from marketing research: knowledge they can use in their daily work.  

But rigor in qualitative research demands that the topline report never be thought of as the bottom line report. More often than not, a thoughtful review of notes, audio and video recordings, comments that respondents have committed to paper, and transcripts (when they're available) yields a fuller, truer picture of what actually happened in the groups or interviews than even the most concise topline report can provide. Just as a thoughtfully designed set of banner tabs reveal far more than the first set of marginal data in a quant study, so too does the final report-- enriched with verbatims, video, and tabulations of what people wrote down on paper-- have the power to provide more insight than any quickly-generated topline report ever can.

So, I guess this emphasis on rigor in qualitative research makes me a little "sciency." But that's not such a bad thing, after all. Like the Latin word scientia and the Greek word episteme, the word science means nothing more than to know. And, at the end of the day, I always assume that's all my clients really want from marketing research: knowledge they can use in their daily work.

Editor's Note:  

This year marks CSA's fifteenth year in business. As part of the observance, we offer a multi-part series of reflections on themes of historical importance to our practice.   

In our next edition: Off-the-shelf research solutions vs. cookie-cutter results