indirect and direct research

University Degree Business and Administrative studies

A Critical Comparison of Direct and

Indirect Qualitative Research Procedures

This essay will focus on direct and indirect research procedures and various techniques used in different situation. It will also include a comparison of the differing research procedures with emphasis on advantages and disadvantages and difference of both of the techniques. It will also provide you an overview of general marketing research.

Marketing Research is a tool to provide accurate, reliable, valid and correct information to the management in order to help in the process of decision making. It is a tool widely used by the management of various organizations to provide them with more detailed information about the market they operate in. The research is usually made up mainly of consumer research which is very good for organizations which are mainly consumer focused. This gives marketing managers guidelines to strategic and tactical decisions when i.e they launch a new product. Without accurate marketing research and the right information gathered it would make not any sense for an organization to take important decisions which would then affect the organization negatively.

Therefore it is necessary to conduct professional marketing research to ensure the product will succeed at every stage of the product lifecycle.

Qualitative research seeks out of the problems of its topic through the analysis of unstructured information which could be through interview transcripts and recordings, emails, notes feedback forms or videos. It does not just rely on statistics or numbers which is usually the base of quantitative research methods. This form of research is used to get detailed information about people’s attitudes, behaviours and lifestyles. It is a good way of gathering and collecting quality information about different aspects in different market situations so the business can keep improving their research strategies accordingly. Organizations who use this kind of research usually have a team of specialist researchers who are continuously looking to find better ways to understand consumers thought processes and behaviour. This information is then to be discussed by decision makers and as usual statistically analysed. Putting it all together, we can say that this method is much more in depth and detail than for example conducting primary and secondary research. There are two types of qualitative research, one is direct and the other indirect. The direct approach consists of focus groups and depth interviews.

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Focus groups are groups of people who have been brought together to discuss a specific topic in depth. A moderator usually leads the discussion of the group which is usually made up of 6 to 12 people at the same time and last for about 90 minutes up to 6 hours. The discussion can be recorded through audiocassettes, videotapes and notes from observations. Focus groups are a very useful tool for collecting relevant and reliable data. The discussion allows the moderator to investigate complex behaviour such as what different people think about a certain topic and why they hold such views can help to identify these changes of consumer behaviour. A key advantage of this type of discussion is that it can be very creative with different people sitting in a relaxed environment. Bringing up ideas by group members could reveal ideas which the moderator has not thought off at the time. Focus groups are the most qualitative marketing research procedures accounting for 11 per cent of all global marketing research expenditure in 2004(Marketing Research, An applied approach, page 183, Naresh K. Maholtra). The disadvantage of this method is that some people of the group might not feel comfortable with others and might not open up and bring ideas. The other issue is that some of these groups might be difficult to lead for the moderator this could be because of the lack of ‘chemistry’ within the group. Also the informal situation in these discussions could give decision makers relying on the this false information because of the unstructured nature of this method.

In-depth interviews are similar to group discussions; the only difference is that only one person is being interviewed at a time. These interviews usually last from 30 to 60 minutes in which the interviewer asks the person very detailed questions which could be anything from every day situations to very personal information which the interviewee might reveal. This kind of research requires a very experienced interviewer with very good interpersonal and communication skills due to the nature of respond the person might give him. The access to this information is very precious to a lot of organizations and could reveal more answers to questions than ‘focus groups’. On the other side there also disadvantages of this method. The same as in focus groups the person might not be so comfortable with the interviewer that is why the conductor has to be very experienced. At the same time, this means that an experienced interviewer costs more money. Also as the interviews are very short in time, they might not reveal all the answers to decision makers.

The indirect approach of marketing research is made up of projective techniques and is split up into four categories which are:

Association Techniques
Completion Techniques
Construction Techniques
Expressive techniques

In the Association technique, individuals are presented with a stimulus and are asked to respond with the first thing which comes into their mind. This is also called ‘word association’ where people are asked to respond to certain test words so they can be analysed and observed in the way they answer. The data is then collected on basis of the frequency of response; amount of time passes by before the respond and the number of individuals who did not respond at all.

The Completion technique is similar to the word association technique but in this method the respond of the person is already directed to certain extend. Usually, participants are asked to complete sentences or parts of stories which they have to complete. Through this technique the participant can be easily directed to a certain topic and give a more informative response.

Construction technique requires the participant to construct a response in form of a story or dialogue. The researcher gives the participant less information and so gives the individual more freedom to respond. In this method picture response or cartoon tests techniques are usually used to collect information. In the picture response technique the person is given pictures and is asked to write stories about them. The response will then give the researcher a clearer view of the person’s personality. The cartoon test is made up of cartoon characters and the participants are asked to write a response of one character to another. This will give an overview of the feelings and behaviour of the individual.

In the Expression technique the person is presented with verbal or visual decision and is asked to relate to another person feelings or attitudes without relating themselves with that situation. The most common techniques are role plays; third person and personification technique. In role plays the participants are asked to play another person and think like them in the situation. On the other side the researcher assumes the individual will reflect his own feelings in the role. The third person technique gives the participant a visual or verbal situation of a third person, like a friend, and is asked to comment respond to the action. Again the researcher assumes the person to reflect his own feelings. In the personification technique, the participant is asked to think of a brand as a person. This gives the researcher good information because the person will indirectly tell him what he thinks of the brand.

All of the above mentioned techniques are very different from collecting information directly from people. These techniques could give the researcher responses by participants which could be unintentional as the person might not even notice he might just have given a response which reflects his personal feelings. On the other side this indirect method could mislead information quiet easily as again, an experienced interviewer and presenter of this technique is needed. Some people might not actually be good at giving responses through role plays or visual situations. That is why decision makers either have to spend more money on researchers or be more sceptical and careful about the information used in the decision making process.

Direct and indirect qualitative research can be used in many situations in order to get valid and reliable information out of consumer behaviours and characteristics. Direct research is very much directed on participants and could not actually reveal a lot information and data. On the other side indirect methods are a bit more interesting when conducting and this why a lot of information can be collected and analysed which could not be gathered through the direct approach of marketing research. Decision makers in the management have to be careful when using information and have to use both of the methods to be more efficient in the decision making process.

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