Nature, nurture and inertia: where do qualitative researchers get their ideas from?

Citation

Barker, A. (2002), "Nature, nurture and inertia: where do qualitative researchers get their ideas from?", Qualitative Market Research, Vol. 5 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/qmr.2002.21605baf.001

Nature, nurture and inertia: where do qualitative researchers get their ideas from?

In 1998, Clive Nancarrow reported on sources of inspiration and professional development amongst commercial qualitative research practitioners (Nancarrow, 1998). From his research (conducted in 1997) he concluded, amongst other things, that commercial researchers have a hunger for new ideas and sources but that they are also sceptical about the contribution of the more academic perspectives to their apparently overly busy commercial lives.

I write at the beginning of 2002 as a practitioner (like several others) who tries to bridge the gap between academic and commercial worlds (and perhaps world views). However, such "human bridges" are often lonely voices in the mainstream flow of researchers who feel too pressured to pause for academic thought, or are not adequately experienced to trawl the literature for inspiration and development. Researchers often say that they are interested in what is distilled and disseminated on their behalf but they are not sufficiently impressed to take out time to trawl the literature themselves.

At the same time ideas abound – the world of commercial qualitative research is awash with apparently new techniques, new models, new approaches. The self image of the sector is of creative developers, inspired gurus, bearers of always new wisdom and unique insight to the tables of brand managers and advertisers.

The commercial pressures to innovate (occasionally for the sake of it) are indeed very great – client research briefs often literally beg for new ways of approaching problems. We know our competitors will be proposing living with a sample of families for two weeks in order to gain those hidden nuggets of insight, which will provide the leverage that brand of cat food really needs; so we need to go one step further, one step wackier. Or so it can feel.

So, where do commercial qualitative researchers get their ideas from; have they suddenly developed a taste for reading obscure journals, do they finally know their Baudrillard from their Bourdieu?

One interesting development in the industry is that new graduates tend to have experience of qualitative research theory and application from their degrees. This was highly unusual a few years ago, but is more commonplace now. Thus newer research executives will have some grounding in the discipline and this might affect the way in which they seek out and consume sources of development and inspiration.

Informal research with colleagues across the qualitative industry reveals that there is interest in the fruits of academe, in particular in such areas as "ethnography" which was the buzzword of 2001 (as with all buzzwords it was often grossly misused as unthinking shorthand for observation or accompanied shops), but its use probably reveals an emergent movement in the ethnographic direction. This interest however still struggles to be more than just that in many circumstances because many researchers simply do not know where to start, as they will often lack the relevant academic specialism to know the texts they should seek out or dust off.

So where does the inspiration come from? In my view it comes from too few people and sources, for example important "inspiration intermediaries" such as Wendy Gordon and others trying to promote academic sources to their colleagues as worthwhile sources of commercially leverageable ideas.

What commercial qualitative researchers do particularly well, however, is ad hoc innovation – the industry is very Heath Robinson, or perhaps Robot Wars is a better contemporary comparison. Qualitative researchers are naturally inquisitive, or at least the successful ones should be and so they are always on the look out for eclectic sources of inspiration (e.g. using the cultural iconic status of the Smash Aliens ad campaign of the 1970s for the basis of new product development research projective technique; getting respondents to consider competing brands as Blind Date contestants as a way of teasing out brand positioning or communication insights). They are also adept at developing existing material but in an individual and sometimes idiosyncratic way –’this might take the form of "borrowing" ideas from previous projects or colleagues' work or simply from considering the usual options (focus groups or depths, brand personification, completion techniques, etc.) and developing them to suit a different context or client seeking conspicuous innovation.

Of course training also takes place – the research industry is quite good at nurturing its members with a comprehensive training offer and an excellent annual conference. The larger players also take training, development and innovation very seriously as a commercial necessity both to motivate and retain staff as well as to maintain competitive edge. Some companies foster relationships (formal and informal) with academics in order to provide a funnel and filter for the best that can be offered from universities and business schools.

However I believe the bulk of qualitative practitioners make life very difficult by inventing everything for themselves and then reinventing it the next day for good measure. To an extent this situation suits commercial practitioners fine.

At a personal level, commercial qualitative practitioners are self motivated, self starters –’the job is very much about individual performance (as a moderator or presenter) and individual brain power. It is often introverted and surprisingly blinkered, not to invention per se but to ideas not invented here. Many practitioners also feel that they need to innovate at the speed of light and they might even have a feeling that development of ideas in academic circles is too constricted by process to be of use to them. Commercial qualitative research is very much about what works rather than what is right or true. This can drive both ad hoc innovation as well as inertia – in many cases what works might be what has been done many times before – the dominance of the focus group is testimony to the fact for all the bluster of development in the qualitative industry both clients and practitioners will often back the favourite rather than risk their shirt on a 66-1 outsider.

Does this mean, therefore, that the future is bleak for academic-commercial co-operation and mutually beneficial development? My belief is that this is not the case and that practitioners' hunger for new ideas will turn into an appetite for more satisfying, grounded models and ways of thinking; indeed research for a paper which I co-authored at the MRS Conference in 2000 (Barker et al., 2001) indicated that the emergent paradigm for commercial research can be described as informed eclecticism, i.e. the blend of grounded knowledge from a wide range of sources, with a willingness to be highly methodologically innovative in order to deliver those all important insights.

Finally, then, there is hope that sometimes reluctant colleagues will shortly see the light and start to lighten the burden on others' brains, bookshelves and subscription budget.

Andy Barker NFO MBL

ReferencesBarker, A., Nancarrow, C. and Spackman, N. (2001), "Informed eclecticism: a research paradigm for the 21st century", International Journal of the Market Research Society, Vol. 43 No. 1, pp. 3-28.Nancarrow, C. (1998), "Practitioner perspectives: significant sources of inspiration and areas for future development", Qualitative Market Research Journal, Vol. 1 No. 2.