I’ve just arrived back from giving a presentation at the Worldwide Conference on Qualitative Research in Budapest.  My presentation discussed ways to recognize when research participants are lying and methods to get past those lies, to understand what they really think.

The conference included many fascinating presentations, including several others that focused on ways to obtain a more accurate understanding of respondents’ thoughts and feelings.  One was given by my friend and colleague Daniel Berkal of The Palmerston Group in Toronto.  He gave a presentation about ways to combine ethnographic methods with focus groups to obtain deeper insights.  We recently combined methods at Bureau West when we conducted shop-along interviews with individual women at supermarkets followed by focus groups with all the women together.  That way, the women were able to talk about their shopping behavior as it happened, and then we also benefitted from the synergy of the group discussion.

Daniel took the approach a step further when he was tasked with learning about alcoholic beverage consumption at night clubs.  He recruited people to come to an evening at the night club to be filmed in reality-show style.  The club was kept open to other customers, though they had to agree to be on film – much like the situation in an actual reality show.  The next day (during the day), the people who had been recruited as research participants came back to the club for focus groups.  Placing them back in the same location helped them remember more detail about their experience.  In addition, Daniel and his colleagues played video of the previous evening to obtain more detailed reactions.

This type of approach, combining immersive research with a retrospective method such as focus groups, provides clients with more insights on ways to connect with customers and ways to more effectively promote their products.

Looking for ways to get inside your customers’ heads?  Please call us at 818-752-7210 to discuss.

Sources: “Breaking Down the Glass – Incorporating Immersive Ethnography with Conventional Techniques to Create Deeper Understanding,” Daniel Berkal, Worldwide Conference on Qualitative Research, 5/1/14; Bureau West research