American Families — a deep dive A central theme in this book is “the economy of dignity” whereby people earn peer respect by showing they know about things that matter within a subculture. This is especially true for younger people who are in the process of defining their identity. For example, school aged kids earn […]
Very shortly after September 11th, 2001 I had the option to go to Tel Aviv, or to get up in the middle of the night and listen by phone to the focus groups being conducted there. I opted to listen by phone given the jittery airport scenes I was seeing. They placed the old school […]
This movie, “Kitchen Stories” is based on a true story about a large-scale ethnography conducted in the 1940’s in Sweden. It illustrates with adorable humor what happens when ethnography is used in the wrong way, even if for the right reason. And it’s about humans. You can rent it on Amazon for less than the […]
An occupational hazard for a researcher is exposing negative feedback about a client’s brand or a product. This can be especially dicey when talking with people in real time when clients are present. Tech-centric companies have a bad rep for blaming users and/or researchers when the developers watch people struggle to figure out how to […]
Part I of this series “Fact, Fiction and the Curated Self” explains how qualitative researchers explore the story people tell about themselves: their motivations, perceptions, desires, needs and beliefs. These stories are not about facts or behaviors. Behavioral data are observable in our digital footprints. On the other hand, the story people tell about themselves […]
That idea that people distort the “truth” when telling you about themselves is nothing new to seasoned qualitative researchers. My first research job out of grad school involved interviewing jail detainees about their drug and unsafe sex behaviors. Being let out of their cell to talk to the lady with the clipboard and drink the […]
It’s crystal ball time again. What will 2017 mean for market research? Some predictions seem to get trotted out year after year, like “Expect greater demand for actionable insights” or “Increased automation and more technology-based solutions will become the norm”. These are important deliverables and solutions, but demand for them isn’t cyclical, and never really […]
“Do you ever get the feeling that the only reason we have elections is to find out if the polls were right?” — Robert Orben There can be little argument that this election season is both historic in its significance as well as in its level of negative discourse. One aspect of the campaign that […]
Nonbinary and Gender Non-conforming Fashion In my work in qualitative research, gender identity and labels come up regularly, and their intersection with the fashion world has taken a fascinating turn of late. Nonbinary.org, a wiki for nonbinary gender education and advocacy explains that “some nonbinary people like clothes that don’t give any female or male […]
I’m a qualitative researcher, and I regularly write screening questionnaires. The basic demographic questions we have asked for decades are: age, gender, marital status, education, employment and sometimes ethnicity. We do this for two reasons: 1) to ensure we include a mix of people, and 2) to exclude people who have no experience or interest […]
