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    The Practice of Qualitative Research

This section is devoted to the advancement of the practice of qualitative research, or....

....how to gain reliable and valid information from your respondents.   

A lofty goal, certainly.  We want to gain reliable information, information that is consistent and repeatable.  We also want valid information, the type that can be said to be the truth, and not some made up at the moment imagined truth, something that can be confirmed by multiple observations or respondents. 

This is not easy to do.  Everyone knows the party game where a description of some thing or event is told to one person, who then repeats it to another, and so on until five or ten people later the description is completely altered.  Individual perception is notoriously unreliable and many times shown to be invalid.  Such is the hope of defense attorneys. 

Group Think and the Desire to Please.

Raise your hand, if, as a focus group moderator you have purposefully moved your respondents in one topical direction, then another, just to see if they really meant what they were saying.  It's an old moderator's trick.  Are the respondents simply "going along to get along" by engaging in group agreement behavior?  Or, does their agreement with one another have some basis in reality.  

Example: I once had a telecommunications client who was convinced that we didn't have to do all four of the planned focus groups because in the middle of the second group he had all the information he needed to know.  He had heard a few phrases from one of the respondents that fit his perception of what the outcome should be.  That was it.  For him it was a done deal. 

You can guess what came next. I asked him to wait and watch, and by the end of the session the respondents were fervently pounding the table proclaiming just the opposite of what this decision maker had hoped to hear.  Does this ability to sway a focus group invalidate the methodology?  No, not at all.  A good moderator steals against swaying the group. A good moderator seeks all sides of an argument. We need to make sure our client hears even what he or she does not want to hear. (Visit QRCA for more discussion of this issue.). 

It is not an understatement to say that qualitative researchers have a huge responsibility.  In a short amount of time, often in rather contrived environments, they need to get a balanced perspective that is not forced or manipulated in any way.  Ethnographers have been struggling with doing so ever since anthropologists began the fine art of participant observation.  Actually, in many ways the ethnographer has it easy compared to a focus group moderator.  S/he can take the time necessary and can speak to as many people as needed, but most of all, s/he can observe in situ.  As a participant observer the ethnographer has what the focus group moderator does not, a real setting, watching people do the behavior that is of the most interest to us. 

The Techniques section will continue to evolve, and I hope many readers will want to participate.  Drop me a line about the topics of most interest to you.