The notion of "Truth" is spinning in my mind after the lecture this morning. By way of background I come to this graduate program from a 16 year career in advertising and marketing and an undergraduate degree in psychology, so the notion of "truth" has left me cynical and a little battle scarred.
I've had extensive experience in creating and participating in dozens of product and consumer based research projects -- both qualitative and quantitative.
I have to admit that when I was reading Luker's description of qualitative techniques as "unscientific, soft and (although people rarely say this out loud) feminine" (pg.25) I was cheering! Actually cheering. Perhaps it's because I'm jaded having been led astray to develop unsavoury products and produce some of the worst creative ever developed after sitting in focus groups for 3 consecutive nights, or, perhaps it's because of the enormous shift I've seen in the approach to research over the course of my career. But whatever the reason I find myself definitely biased toward the quantitative methods in the search for "truth".
The shift in method over the course of my career has gone from qualitative "disaster checking" creative or product concepts to rigorous survey and data-mining approaches to better understand the consumer mind sets (to then categorize them), then understand the consumer needs and what "keeps them up at night" and subsequently create products and services based on those needs. This has been the process for "truth" as superficial as it seems and it has been deemed unacceptable in my discipline to simply put 12 people together in a room, give them some snacks, and ask them. We've had to develop surveys, draw from other sources (Stats Can data for example) etc... to put together a picture of whom these groups of people are and what they want. And then...find more of them!
I very much look forward to letting go of some of my professional bias to further explore "truth" in a context much broader and bigger than the confines of my previous career (and clients) have allowed for. Suzanne.
It seems quite logical for the advertising industry to move away from relying too heavily on focus group research. It seems like there is a lot of self-selection bias, as well as issues with group dynamics.
ReplyDeleteI also did my undergraduate in Psychology and as part of the program we had to participate in other students' experiments. The surveys I had to complete were often tedious because they seemed to ask the same questions over and over. While I recognize that this is for validity purposes -- asking the same question several times and getting a consistent answer means more than asking it once -- it always seemed like participant fatigue would be a resounding problem. I know that after the 3rd or 4th reiteration I felt tempted to randomly bubble answers just to go home.
I also have friends who participate in consumer focus groups for money and their motivations often regard the "free sandwiches" or the "gift cards." In particular, I had one friend who did a focus group on Personal Banking and admitted later that he "made it all up." He had simply done research the day before and created an imaginary financial portfolio for himself -- RRSPs, GICs, Mutual Funds etc., and then talked about them in the group as though he really had those things. In reality he did not even have a bank account.