nm0976: what i'd like to do this morning is to get into the sort of practical 
details of market research if you remember what the the programme looks like 
over the next few weeks in the next few weeks starting next week you're going 
to get quite involved with the er the detail of of er methodology so next week 
Professor namex is going to be talking about conjunct analysis which is a quite 
a modern market research methodology to er basically find out what consumers 
like about new products er potential new products but before we do all that 
we've deliberately dealt with last week the kinds of data that you'll be coming 
across in this er er course and the sorts of data that market researchers deal 
with and this week we want to deal with the practical aspects of collecting 
that data and there are in a sense there are always we always deal with this in 
two ways and the first way or or th-, th-, there are in a sense two themes to 
this there's a qualitative stream of market 
research and there's a quantitative stream of market research i'm going to deal 
with the basically the quantitative stream of data collection first and then 
look briefly at the k-, the qualitative stream but just to draw the distinction 
between the two qualitative research is essentially exploratory as i i think i 
mentioned in week one you're trying to find out ideas concepts er you might be 
testing people's reactions to certain things but in a qualitative way and what 
that effectively means is that you will never have large enough numbers to do 
statistical tests and this is why we're going to try and get this out of the 
way there are ways of dealing with you namex last week talked to you about 
attitude measurement and some of that verges on qualitative but what she was 
referring to was essentially building up enough information about people's 
attitudes to be able to render it useful for statistical analysis of one sort 
or another and attitudes as you will see 
fall into today's session as well attitude measurement so qualitative research 
is about basically exploratory work today's the first part of today's session 
is more about quantitative work and collecting enough data to be able to do 
something statistical with it now qualitative research in some ways boils down 
to a f-, very few basic techniques and at the end of the morning i'm going to 
just show you a video which shows you how focus groups work because focus 
groups are the er the main vehicle that are used for qualitative research it's 
often said that qualitative research should come before quantitative research 
and for the sake of variety i'm doing it the other way round it doesn't really 
matter because qualitative research can stand on its own you know as you'll see 
in a second in order to design a decent questionnaire you need to have some 
idea of where people stand on the issue you're looking at it's dangerous of 
course to er impose your views as a researcher so 
what you what what we'll be looking at are ways of in qualitative work ways of 
prompting the sort of information we need to design questionnaires but we'll 
start off with some thoughts and some methods for dealing with quantitative 
data and just to give you a flavour for what's the sorts of problems and the 
sorts of issues that we're going to be looking at later on these are common 
market research problems analysing product usage very straightforward in a way 
just saying okay how m-, how much of th-, this product do people use why do 
they use it how much more might they use and so on so a fairly straightforward 
er quantitative assessment of of product usage or sales market researchers 
always talk about usage because it's more than just sales sales is just a 
number so much was sold usage is far more concerned with the way people react 
to the product the way people use the product what people do with it and so on 
you're going to get in the next couple of weeks quite a lot on 
market segmentation so quantitative research to describe market segments and if 
you're trying to split a mass market into lots of submarkets or segments you 
need quantitative research usually because it's quantitative research that says 
this many people are likely to be in this segment if you're trying to target 
market if you're trying to focus on a particular segment then you will need to 
know er basically how many people are in that segment or whether it's worth 
your while going for it so describing market segments market segmentation is 
usually quantitative and you're going to look at cluster and factor analysis 
and other things to er describe market segments assessing attitudes as namex 
spoke to you last week er attitudes of purchasers are assessed mostly by 
quantitative research describing product image is er on the border again 
quantitative research can be used you can collect data from large numbers of 
people er to descr-, and and see what they think 
of product image but there's a there's a qualitative aspect to that as well 
identify market opportunities and redefine and reposition products namex talked 
to you about scaling well you're going to look later on at ma-, er at 
multidimensional scaling which comes up with er ideas on those two those last 
two er items there now a brief recap on last week namex talked about the types 
of data well there are different types of data categories of data and these 
have a big impact on er how you collect the information the the the sorts of er 
vehicles you can use for that so numbers as labels is nominal data ordinal data 
where you put it in order interval data where there's some implication of the 
distances between each point let's say on a scale and ratio data where there's 
some absolute zero point and the differences between the the points means 
something now how are you going to get hold of people we're looking at 
questionnaire design which is a sort of general er description of of 
of variety of different ways of collecting information but the method of 
contact is obviously important how are you going to get hold of these people 
and these are the four sort of most common ways not necessarily in order but if 
you're thinking of how market researchers collect their information those are 
the ways they do it number four now is being used computers are being used to 
support er market researchers a great deal more and the whole business of both 
selling things over the telephone and doing market research over the telephone 
has become a very important issue in market research and you'll see reference 
to th-, to er terms like C-A-T-I computer assisted telephone interviewing i me-,
i think it probably goes without saying now that when you're phoned up and 
somebody wants to conduct a market research interview with you er they're 
probably sitting in front of a P-C and we'll we'll look at some of the 
implications of that but one of the main ones of 
course is that the data entry occurs at the same time as the asking of the 
questions so there's huge savings in terms of that and indeed some of the 
analysis can go on more or less as you're speaking things like you know in 
questionnaires you'll need to need to skip from one section to another well the 
computer does that automatically next week you're going to hear about a 
technique called adaptive conjoint analysis and this is an analysis method that 
i-, as it suggests sort of adapts to the person who's being interviewed and 
starts to er react or ask different questions depending on the er the person 
telephone interviewing er is increasing in in er its coverage its its 
importance but in some ways it's postal questionnaires that we we want to 
concentrate on today because it's postal questionnaires that in a sense have to 
be the most accurate because posnal k-, postal questionnaires are the ones 
where the respondent doesn't have any help at all er there may be follow-ups 
and you may 
follow up by telephone and so on but er it's postal questionnaires which need 
to be the most accurate if you like personal interviewing in some ways is very 
good very high levels of response because although you might have told somebody 
on Broad Street who is trying to hassle you to answer a few questions to go 
away but at at that the response rate for er personal interviews is actually 
far higher than these other methods people find it a lot more difficult to turn 
away somebody who's sort of standing there in front of them the problem with 
personal interviews of course is that the interviewer is there and the 
interviewer themselves can bias the results and i think that's just it's a it's 
a l-, it's a lesson in research in general that interviewer bias of course is 
to be avoided but if you've got somebody in person and and i-, it's very 
interesting if you think about this perhaps having done this course you might 
think well you know i i tend to submit to these interviewers just 
to see how they do it and whether they're any good at it and you quite often 
find personal interviews where the interviewer is hassling you to answer the 
question and so you you're you're you're sort of thinking about your and they 
say well how about or do you mean and this kind of thing and and this is where 
distortions can come in so personal interviews are good high response rates but 
there is the problem of bias and of course they're very expensive you're em-, 
employing real people to ask these questions telephone interviewing less 
expensive but a less good response rate and again some problems of of bias 
there's a there's a there's a problem whenever you're a person who's asking 
another person questions there's always a problem of bias because you want 
people to er expand on their answers and you want people to er sort of chat 
about what they're interested in and therefore you have to interact with them 
and that interaction is what can cause 
the biases er the alternative is to have a very strict interviewing schedule 
and a very strict questionnaire and you do get this particularly on the 
telephone where you know you get this sort of automaton who's actually a person 
but they're they're it's a very stilted kind of interview and some would say 
that the quality of the data that is collected as a result is not that high so 
we're concentrating on postal questionnaires but as-, accepting that you need 
good a good data collection er device for all of those things well sampling 
you're probably all familiar with sampling but you've got to make these 
decisions you've got to identify the population of people that you're er 
researching population of people you're talking to you need to draw up a sample 
frame that is some device which says here are er the rules that we're going to 
use in sampling these people the sampling unit are you going to sample 
households or individuals males females and so on so picking 
the the people the sampling method well statisticians would love everything to 
be probability samples preferably random er in practice i think most market 
researchers are much more pragmatic than that so that pragmatism means that 
they start looking at non-probability samples quota samples saying right we'll 
have certain numbers of people in each of these categories er when you get on 
to things like consumer panels they're probably sampled more er accurately if 
you like or more scientifically the only problem with them is that you've got 
the same people every time that's a good thing but it's also a bad thing 
because they they become their characteristics then get er er in a sense put 
into the the the research process and they they er may be atypical by 
cooperating with you sample size you've got to decide sample plan how are you 
actually going to do it now i'm going to show you lots of examples of different 
types of questions that you can ask here are some very 
general design issues though questions need to be precise as you'll you'll see 
in a moment they need to be well-ordered incidentally s-, sorry i should have 
said this earlier the assessment for this course er we will i think announce 
next week formally but what it's going to be is a case study basically and you 
will be asked to evaluate comment appraise the case study and it'll be a case 
study describing a sort of typical market research process er but it will also 
include data so there will be data that you can analyse to support your case 
and you will be able to analyse it basically in whatever way you want to and 
that'll be up to you i i say that now because you won't if somebody was asking 
earlier about will we have to do a questionnaire and that they've probably been 
talking to people who did it last year where we everybody every single 
individual ran a questionnaire and it got it actually got rather out of hand it 
was extremely difficult to mark because 
people producing huge volumes of things so this is this session is just to 
introduce you to how this sort of data is collected but you won't be doing this 
as part of the assessment so questions have got to be precise and i'm going to 
show you some examples of good and bad questions in a second you need to decide 
very carefully on the ordering i think there's no excuse these days for in a 
sense for getting this wrong and certainly presentation is really important and 
so we'll talk a little bit about presentation and how you order the questions 
to make sure that you get there's a there are different schools of thought to 
make sure that you get an optimum response in preparing yourself for this you 
need to have some idea of what you think people are going to respond or how you 
think people are going to respond so the sort of categories the sort of ways 
people might respond the different possible answers to multiple choice 
questions for example you need instructions for interviewers and as i say this 
can range from very explicit instructions to as to how somebody should ask 
particular questions or it could just be er 
so some questionnaires as you'll see have very er clear instructions for 
interviewers some have instructions that are really may well be over the top 
may well be too detailed and then data processing requirements [cough] and 
you'll see some examples of how er we mark up questionnaires in order to make 
them amenable to data processing so how are we going to develop this thing well 
you need some kind of er statement of objectives the sort of resources you have 
available and the constraints to the development of the the survey so you've 
got to set very clear objectives as to what your er questionnaire is designed 
to achieve you need to say something about how you're going to collect the data 
the sorts of types of question that you're going to have the the way you word 
them the flow of the questionnaire and so on 
obtaining approval is important in the university we have er a body known as 
the Ethics Committee and technically speaking if you go out well if you go 
outside the university to er research anything you need to get the approval of 
the Ethics Committee and the Ethics Committee is in some ways is quite a good 
idea the university and indeed any market research body doesn't want the its 
name to be pulled down by the market research process of course er and so we 
have to if we're going out and indeed if students are doing projects we have to 
get the implicit approval of the Ethics Committee sometimes that can come from 
the head of department but er two or three years ago just for your information 
the er this group was actually a group of undergraduate students decided to do 
a a market research project which was the assessment for the course er and they 
were given a free choice as to what subject they wanted to er ask people about 
and er the explicit instruction was that the people 
they researched should only be members of the course and this group came and 
said we want to do a kind of sex survey and what this was it w-, it was fairly 
innocent although er i did say you know this must strictly be kept within the 
group and it it sort of i won't go into the details but it it was asking 
various fairly personal questions and the first i heard well the next thing i 
heard of it was somebody called up from who'd been accosted by one of these 
students somewhere down in town and had been asked these questions and we got 
into a little bit of trouble about it and we hadn't cle-, i hadn't cleared it 
with the committee because it wasn't er i didn't believe it was going out so 
anyway there are there are that's a a very obvious problem but you do need to 
obtain approval there is a market research society code of practice on on 
asking er questions on on how to do research you need to pretest the 
questionnaire this is really important those of you some of you 
will be doing this for er your dissertations some of you i know are collecting 
primary data you need to pretest the thing because you're the researcher you're 
very close to the subject you know what you're talking about but you've got to 
check that other people do as well and if you want a statistically valid sample 
of a hundred people or two-hundred people you've got to make sure you're 
collecting the data properly and it's these pretests or pilots that will tell 
you whether it's going to work or not so make sure you do pilots and and you 
know this this can be up to s-, sort of half a dozen different er people that 
you question and you will soon find if you've got any doubts about the length 
of the questionnaire or the style of particular questions or whether the sort 
of issues you're asking them about are valid you'll soon find out er from that 
so er piloting is really important prepare the final questionnaire and then 
implement the survey this is the sort of layout 
that you might use for a questionnaire it's there are no right and wrong 
answers here really but er this is a layout every questionnaire of course has 
to carry an identification number i think i in the first week i was talking 
about using er a spreadsheet basically a a matrix to enter the data a lot of 
people use Excel for that which is fine er the bad thing about Excel i think i 
mentioned is that it will let you sort the thing in a rather rudimentary way 
and if you're trying to sort your data er and you if you know in Excel [cough] 
you can select three or four columns with the data in it and forget to select 
the others and if you then sort it all the data will be out you you will it 
will be non-consistent things like Access and S-P-S-S don't let you do that if 
you're going to delete something or sort something it the whole row would be 
sorted so Excel is quite a good database but be careful because you do have to 
er you do have to watch that the ob-, obviously an I-D number is one way of 
sorting things so you sort by the order in which you collected the data or 
something screeners are qualifying questions and this quite often er this is 
quite often important because sometimes you'll be wanting to collect data on 
people who er have particular characteristics and you won't know until you er 
ask them whether they have those characteristics one classic example is and 
this this happens with student projects and other work we've done is quite 
often with food products you want to talk to vegetarians because you think that 
they might er have well they obviously have different physically they have 
different purchasing habits but they might have different attitudes to food but 
you can't well i can't spot a vegetarian just by looking at him or her 
[laughter] er so you need to ask s-, screening questions to find out and quite 
often you'll er you may have come across this you'll get stopped in the street 
and someone will say you know have you been to the cinema in the last six 
months 
if you say no they say right thanks very much goodbye that's a it's a screening 
question [laughter] okay so y-, those qualifying questions are really important 
er i've got a a questionnaire to show you in a second but we'll just go through 
this [cough] you need some introductory remarks and again this may well be a er 
a comment that the the personal interviewer makes but if it's if you're if this 
is a mail questionnaire you'll need some remarks to explain what you're doing 
it's no good just having you know first question how old are you or something 
er you need some explanation of the work you're doing and why and all market 
researchers do this there is one i suppose one exception to that there's a a 
technique if you like called an omnibus survey and this is where several firms 
pay to include questions about their own interests on a big survey and you may 
may well have come across these 
and these tend to be very mixed and so lots of introductory remarks about the 
survey are not necessarily relevant transition questions these are ones that 
sort of take you from one er part of the questionnaire to another if you're 
asking people about food consumption and you're you're starting off on pricing 
issues for example then you might have a question that er links price with the 
amount they buy or something and then you go on to deal more closely with the 
amount they buy and demand and so on difficult questions [cough] and this is 
the textbook er idea r-, really this depends on er the practice on the ground 
if you like and what you're asking but i don't think you'd put difficult 
questions right at the top or very sensitive questions right at the start of 
the questionnaire 
you need to distinguish questions very clearly from instructions and you need 
to think about classification data about the respondent virtually all market 
research studies as you'll see will and and particularly when you get into 
market segmentation you need information about the people you're asking you're 
not you're very unlikely to be researching something related to some kind of 
mass market but you say okay well it doesn't matter who these people are we 
just want a hundred people and we'll ask them some questions because by far 
ninety-nine per cent of the time you'll be saying well we need to know whether 
older people think this and younger people think that or people in the north 
think one thing and people in the south think another thing so those the the 
classification data or the demographic data is is extremely important and for 
for 
clustering and factronizing various other things as you'll find out this data 
is is vital there are various schools of thought on this er you know there used 
to be big debate about how you could ask people their age and and there was 
sort of er various schools of thought like you you didn't ask people their age 
that would put them off completely so you just had a er you know you had a 
blank box and you evaluated their age yourselves but now the it's current idea 
seems to be you just ask people how old are you er same thing about income that 
is more sensitive it's very difficult to ask people about incomes so as you 
know you start talking to people about er either you have a range of incomes 
and ask people to fill that in or you talk about the occupation of the main 
income earner so if you ask about occupation you get r-, rather more of an idea 
of what people earn so allied to the the types of 
data we were talking about earlier this really helps classify the types of 
question that you ask and they fall into various categories there are direct 
factual questions how much do you earn would be one of them you know are you 
male or female how tall are you this kind of thing it's all very factual er if 
you think about it in data analysis terms a lot of it is quite quantitative by 
which i mean it's it's useful in further ana-, it's it's particularly useful in 
further analysis so if you're collecting things on quantities or prices then 
you know as economists you'll know that that's data that can be used er for 
other things er personal details if you're just collecting information on you 
know whether somebody's going to vote yes in an election or vote no in an 
election it's very simple data it's a dummy variable but it's it's it can be 
useful however if you're ope-, asking open-ended questions like what do you 
feel about the new building er right 
people could write an essay on that er would be very useful because they'd give 
you loads and loads of information but it would be extremely difficult to 
analyse so you've got to strike a balance there is the use of the data and how 
easy it will be to actually use it multiple choice questions and dichotomous 
questions dichotomous being yes or no just look at the different 
characteristics in those [cough] so open-ended questions are great as first 
questions they've still got to establish if you think of th-, the questionnaire 
remember it's postal that's what we're looking at at the moment you think of it 
as being you s-, you as the researcher speaking to people then you need 
something that establishes some rapport with people and you'll see in a second 
different ways of doing that 
so they're they're good first questions for that reason there's very little 
influence on the response what do you think of the new building is a very open 
question you can say exactly what you like you can write as much as you like 
you could give a one word answer or you could write an essay on it so there's 
very little influence on the res-, you're not saying what do you think of the 
new building you know good bad or indifferent you're not you're not imposing on 
people and so you can get insights however there can be interviewer bias 
certainly if it's a a personal interview but the pr-, main problem with open-
ended questions is we're looking at quantitative methods we want to quantify 
the results we therefore need some form of computerized analysis and coding the 
things coding open-ended questions is the main problem that is putting a number 
really to the question to the sorry to the answer that you've been given you 
can precode open-ended questions so you'd have a a list of 
things that you think people are going to respond but they always say different 
things so you you you need to er bear that in mind you can it's usually better 
to do it afterwards multiple choice questions dead easy they reduce interviewer 
bias very easy for people to very easy and fast for people to answer very easy 
for data processing but the argument goes that they are rather difficult to 
design the thing about multiple choice questions is that you are forcing people 
into certain answers if you do this is a good reason for piloting if you have a 
multiple choice question and er you pilot it you may find that people are not 
they don't put the issue that you're asking them about into that particular set 
of categories that you've imposed so that's where your pilots and qualitative 
research will help let me just show you an example of this so this is a 
questionnaire was actually done out of this course a couple of years ago and it 
was to try to 
ask er customers of a farm shop what they thought of the er outlet they were 
visiting and we had a screening question because er it's not actually on there 
but we had a screening process because we wanted to interview customers at the 
farm shop and non-customers so there was a er a screener for that but these are 
basically multiple choice questions of various sorts here's one thinking about 
your visits to the shop do you visit at specific times of the year and there 
were different options and it's multiple choice now if you're asking do you 
visit at specific times of the year summer autumn winter spring there are no 
other options er oh except for all the year round so you know that's a a a 
relatively simple example er we said thinking about your visits to the shop do 
you more often than not visit at specific times of the day morning lunchtime 
afternoon now for all we knew they might come in the middle of the night so we 
had a category called other and this is this is the sort of 
p-, a er a pilot would find out if people did unusual things or did things that 
were not listed on here er what form of transport did you use car bus taxi foot 
bicycle or other so other in multiple choice questions other is obviously a 
catch-all er if you find everyone's ticking other then you've designed the 
thing badly because you haven't obviously identified the right answers that 
people are going to give and this again is where piloting and so on will er 
help the other thing is about bias and it's said that if you offer people 
options er the order you put them in does make a difference now this is a this 
is all sort of fairly straightforward data i don't know if we can find 
something else okay how did you hear about the existence of the shop well on 
the radio from friends newsp-, now if they're trying to think about oh how did 
i hear about this you need to be careful about biasing the survey because of 
the order these are in and people might oh radio yeah 
i'll put radio down okay and there's there's there's various ways of getting 
round this and one is simply to randomize the order and have different 
questionnaires with different orders where do you do your main food shopping 
for the week again the the order may well be important dichotomous questions 
this is yes or no male or female whatever er very easy coding is very simple 
and it offers you the possibility of er using dummy variables in this so you 
can isolate how males and how females think about things but with some issues 
the it may not be seen in this dichotomous way it may not be er an issue of er 
either or and the wording becomes very important in order to to get the right 
sort of response just one thing i just forgot while we're talking about 
multiple choice questions the analysis and coding of multiple choice questions 
is really crucial because if you're thinking about the variables remember 
you're putting this into a spreadsheet or into some sort of analysis 
package and you've got variables and the variable has got to identify each of 
the bits of data that you're dealing with and if i just take one of these says 
where do you do your main food shopping for the week or month that's a very 
deliberate question because we felt that there should only be one answer to 
that where do you do your main food shopping but if we'd said where do you do 
your food shopping then these people could quite easily have ticked more than 
one answer and indeed they did even though we put the word main in there so you 
then come up with a problem because the question arises what is the variable 
here if we had one variable to cover main food shopping so we'd call it main 
food shop or something as the variable name then you'd enter a number dependent 
on which one of these they ticked but if they ticked two you're in real 
problems because you can't if if you've just got the one variable about main 
food shopping and then say i do my main shop-, 
food shopping in Asda and Waitrose then you can't interpret that and this is a 
key thing about multiple choice questions is that you need to decide whether 
it's tick one or tick more than one and if it's tick more than one then each of 
these has to become a variable and if you're doing this later on it's really 
important to to get that difference right you you sometimes see people do what 
what are really rather silly things like if if it's a a tick once so this is 
one variable called main food shopping you then you you see people trying to 
create a number so right we'll say number seven we'll call it number seven if 
they tick Tesco and Asda right and then we'll call it number eight if they tick 
Asda and Sainsbury but then what if they tick three and so on it just gets out 
of hand so if there's a possibility in a multiple choice answer of them ticking 
more than one box you need to create five variables and we've got some rather 
horrendous things here please 
indicate where you shop for the bulk your needs for the following products 
there's an awful lot of data that can be collected in a table like that and 
again as long as people only tick one we're we're all right but of course each 
of these is a variable they start ticking more than them then each cell becomes 
a variable and you get you can get very confused and get an awful lot of 
variables now there are lots of problems obviously in asking people questions 
they relate to things like sensitivity is the issue a tricky one they relate to 
the complexity of the questions they relate to the applicability of the 
questions can people answer them they relate to length so the length of the 
questions themselves and the c-, the length of the questionnaire is an issue 
and then as you'll see asking people hypothetical questions may be something 
that they're not very good at dealing with and asking people leading questions 
as you'll see can bias your results to help avoid this there's a little list of 
things that you need to avoid follow you want simple words you want clear words 
avoid things like leading people biasing people implicit assumptions like 
assuming somebody knows something er which they may not 
unnecessary estimation double-barrelled questions and so on you'll see some 
examples of this now so you need to be specific that still on what was that 
would you here's here's a question would you support increased taxes to pay for 
educational programmes for your children now the trouble with this topic if you 
like is it's it's more of an art than a science and it's very easy to say here 
are some precise rules about how you do it er but it is an art and and that 
looks a perfectly good question but and and in some ways because it's an art 
you can go too far you could make this extremely precise or you could leave it 
relatively vague like this but some would say that's a bit open-ended increased 
taxes well how much you could be a bit more specific i mean that also says 
increased taxes that could be somebody else's anybody explain where that's 
coming from [laughter] 
ss: 
nm0976: what this thing 
ss: 
nm0976: oh you think that's my well that's 
ss: 
nm0976: gosh you can do far 
more exciting things than that you can have a [laughter] gunshot going off or 
something [laughter] er well sorry about that but you'll have to put with it 
these er P-Cs are too efficient er so there's a little bit more it's a little 
bit more specific would you support an increase in your taxes to pay for 
education programmes for your children [laughter] i'm sorry i'm going to have 
to turn that off can't cope with that what is it it's in 
ss: 
nm0976: eh 
ss: 
nm0976: where is it
ss: [laughter] 
nm0976: says no sound look 
ss: 
sm0977: turn the volume off 
nm0976: we could probably do that in a minute 
sm0978: 
nm0976: actually you can do volume here look should do sorry about that there 
we go er so be s-, be relatively specific you need to know your respondents' 
ability to answer the sort of questions you're asking and the context that is a 
very is a question that's very dear to my heart but it might not mean a lot to 
you i don't know the Dearing Committee was the body that a year ago reviewed 
higher education for the Higher Education Funding Council of 
England now i know that but you might not and your respondents might not you 
need to be specific about time and this is something that quite often you're 
asking people questions about things they've done well you very very often 
asking people questions about things they've done so you need to be specific 
again there's a fine line between being specific and being either you know 
overlong or being patronizing but how often did you exercise in the past week 
start with today's date and count back seven days some would say well i know 
what a week is thank you [laughter] and i can count that but get the idea that 
is a totally inappropriate question because you're asking people a question 
which really relies on you know enormous memory and you know er how would they 
work that out but you see this sort of thing again on this fine line between 
being overspecific and being er being too long and being too brief here's one 
place of residence well you could be a bit more specific about that 
what's the name of the city where you currently live er these open-ended things 
accim-, accidents among children are you might want to be more specific and er 
indicating agreement with a statement or something is er a better way of doing 
that here's another one for you in your view does the U-O-R provide a service 
worthy of the fees you pay well of course that relates to the Union of 
Railworkers but you may have thought it was relating to the University of 
Reading you need to be specific and this is something you must have views on 
right i know what this means because i've sort of been involved in educational 
research and stuff but er you might prefer should each module tutor conduct a 
review of how students feel the course has gone each term it's the sa-, it's 
exactly the same question but you've got to phrase it in a way that people 
understand if you were asking this if this questionnaire was aimed at a load of 
educational specialists no problem this is 
a classic sort of loaded question many prominent people have publicly admitted 
they've sought help for problems relating to alcohol abuse what about you 
[laughter] okay it's a very i'll give you another example this is a very famous 
one er it's out of a ninety-fifties article called asking the embarrassing 
question or the loaded question and just just to give you the context one 
virtually can guarantee meaningless responses by direst-, directly asking 
questions such as have you ever defaulted on a credit account do you smoke pot 
at least once a week [laughter] or have you ever been involved in an unreported 
car accident right they're stupid questions people aren't going to er respond 
to them but Alan Barton it says here Alan Barton made the point best in ninety-
fifty-eight when he posed the following parody on ways to ask the question did 
you kill your wife [laughter] and the first approach that you might take to 
asking that question is the casual approach which is do you happen 
to have murdered your wife [laughter] the second approach is multiple choice 
[laughter] would you please read off the number on this card which corresponds 
to what became of your wife [laughter] you hand the card to the respondents and 
the card has one natural death [laughter] two i killed her [laughter] and three 
other [laughter] whatever other might be you could have the sort of er peer 
group approach where you say to you you ask you say to people or you say to the 
respondent as you know many people have been killing their wives recently 
[laughter] do you happen to have killed yours [laughter] er and another other 
people approach would see do you know any people who've murdered their wives 
and how about yourself [laughter] er and then finally it says stare firmly into 
the respondent's eyes ask in simple clear cut language such as that to which 
the respondent is accustomed and with an air of assuming that everyone's done 
everything do you ever kill your wife [laughter] so [laughter] there are 
different ways of asking sensitive questions so on controversial subjects for 
example if you're talking to farmers about their attitudes to convers-, 
conservation it's not particularly 
er approachable to say how many kilometres of hedges have you taken out in the 
past five years so you might do this sort of thing it's the same idea as did 
you kill your wife please describe your policy for hedgerow removal you've got 
to be as clear as possible again without going over the top daily newspapers 
read regularly is a bit vague you might want to specify read or glanced through 
most days of the week you've got to adapt this question to how people deal with 
this kind of issue so m-, maybe people you think maybe people just have a c-, a 
quick glance at the paper and you'd call that reading fine you could get even 
more specific do you read regularly any daily newspaper at least three out of 
and so on but you've got to be clear if you're asking somebody about their 
employment their job just saying is yours an interesting job or a routine job 
might well er you might well find people a bit unhappy about answering that so 
you could ask it another way is yours a job in which you do a lot of hard 
thinking or a job which once you've learned it you always know 
how to do it it's a sort of flavour to how you ask this sort of question you 
might argue that the answer you get from from those two would be rather 
different but you get the idea you've got to ask the question in a way that 
people will be prepared to answer it this is used consistently in advertising 
prestige buyers in advertising or prestige in advertising is used as a m-, a 
major selling point obviously so doctors are always seen advertising headache 
remedies er sports stars are always seen promoting sports drinks and so on but 
it works against you if you're s-, trying to get unbiased responses from people 
so doctors say that increased fibre is good for your health do you agree well 
[laugh] this week is probably not the week to talk about this after the Harold 
Shipman case er doctors say that a quick injection is good for you do you agree 
[laughter] er have you increased the fibre content of your diet over the last 
few months would be another way of putting it and if you 
wanted to be really vague about it have you changed your shopping habits over 
the last few months due to health concerns what products have you been buying 
more of if somebody says i've been buying loads more products with fibre in 
them then you've really got them you've really got a a valid answer there so 
the first one would certainly bias people's responses and and the others might 
be better now this is another one of the most famous areas in which well in 
Britain anyway in which sort of market research gets condescending and 
patronizing is in tax returns the Inland Revenue these days you actually have 
to sort of do it yourself as well it's self-assessment but they send you forms 
and these forms are sort of aimed at sort of five year olds i think because 
they they speak to you basically they're they're not done if anyone i don't 
know if anyone's filled in a tax return but they're not they're not er just 
full of information they're not f-, just far too long but part of the 
length is due to the fact that they're trying to explain things to you to the 
sort of nth degree and so you get things like this this is a a a th-, the the 
sort of spirit of it you could say instead of machinery purchased before grant 
ninety-seven please indicate below the approximate value of any major items of 
machinery before grant what the tax return approach is says in the question 
below i'm asking you to think back over the past the tax return talks to you as 
if it's a person or a friend of yours it's dreadful it says now i would like 
you to turn the page well if i've got to the bottom of the page i probably 
would have worked that out for myself in the question below i'm asking you to 
think back and so on er so you s-, you just see the differences this is the 
double-barrelled thing did you drink coffee with lunch and tea yesterday do you 
mean with lunch and tea or do you mean with lunch or tea or do you mean did you 
drink coffee with lunch and did you 
drink coffee with tea at tea er avoid embarrassing questions obviously 
[laughter] or at least find a way of asking them so a sort of summary of the 
way you can design these questions they've got to be simple you've got this in 
front of you they've got to be simple direct familiar words used should be 
clear specific avoid ambiguity cover one point with one question so don't say 
are you satisfied with the cost and convenience of this product you've got to 
ask that separately avoid leading or loaded questions and emo-, emotional 
questions find ways of asking them if you can't ask them in the questionnaire 
then you maybe have to resort to qualitative research which we'll look at in a 
minute some other ways of collecting that data short questions that are 
applicable to respondents avoid very complex instructions and various sorts of 
bias check and recheck the length of it people are naturally going to be put 
off by anything very long it depends who they are what you're asking them 
about and make sure it reads well and it's presented well as i say i don't 
think these days there's any excuse for poor presentation of questionnaires 
because we've all more or less got the tools to do it properly so i think it's 
important it does affect response rate if you it depends of course what you're 
asking but sort of consumer research if you get a response rate from a postal 
questionnaire of ten per cent you're relatively happy doesn't sound a lot but 
you're relatively happy with that if it's up to sort of twenty or twenty-five 
that's pretty good i think we'll take a short break there are there any 
questions take a short break and come back to how you'd code this and i'll give 
you some other examples before we look at qualitative research 
right just to finish off the discussion of questionnaires we have collected the 
data let's assume that when i first [laugh] when i first arrived here some 
years ago there was a unit called the data processing unit in our department 
and they still operated or there was one at that time there was one P-C in fact 
it was a Macintosh in the department and i think it had it had a hundred-and-
twenty-eight K of RAM or something er anyway there was the data processing unit 
and they they still operated with punched cards and quite a lot of the 
terminology of market research comes from that that er period and you still got 
talk about people punching data in which is entering data in common parlance 
but these punch cards were exactly that little cards with holes in them er and 
i remember seeing them do do a sort on this data so you had a hundred cards 
each of which represented a respondent and the sorting process if you wanted to 
take out the males or the females er was more or 
less a s-, a simplification but it it more or less involved sticking a sort of 
needle through the the hole that represented male and all the female cards 
dropped out and you had the the male cards were hanging on this little pole er 
nowadays we're a bit more sophisticated than that as you know but it is 
important to get the questionnaire properly coded it's very important that the 
as i i mentioned with respect to multiple choice questions er it's very 
important that the data is entered correctly er and in a way that can be 
relatively easily understood and when we looked at S-P-S-S in the first week i 
said things like making sure the variable names are sensible making sure the 
descriptions of those variables are then even more sensible so you can remember 
and understand what you're analysing is v-, very important var one to var 
twenty is not actually very useful for anybody but multiple choice and factual 
questions basically code themselves as you've seen er you've got little 
coding numbers in there and that's quite standard on a questionnaire and they 
they code themselves and you use those numbers in this case er again if it's if 
it's a single answer in this case that will just be a number representing that 
answer it's simply a label it's nominal data factual questions code themselves 
how many kilometres of hedges have you removed they just give you a number open-
ended as i said they need a coding frame in advance or ex-post codings after 
you've got all the results in you sort things into categories with open-ended 
questions and indeed with qualitative data there are bits of software that can 
help you with this there's a thing called Nudist you may have come across which 
is for classifying qualitative data largely for classifying data which is in 
the form of er transcriptions of recordings interviews focus groups or whatever 
and what Nudist basically does is pick out key words and organise them in a 
sort of hierarchy to try to 
establish what are the things that are most important to people 
dichotomous use basically done in variables ones or zeros er so there's the 
questionnaire you'll see just remind you of the things that we were asking so 
you've got the questionnaire number the interviewer the date the time er how 
far have you travelled what form of transport did you use what that looks like 
is that when you collect remember each row is a an observation each row is a 
person so you've got code number name date time and then you have to start 
getting into these variable names which i think it it ought to be the next 
innovation in computing i think is that they ought to be able to let variable 
names go over eight letters and S-P-S-S the next versions i think should work 
on that because how far and transport and M-U-M-U-eighteen which must be number 
of can't even remember 
ss: 
nm0976: number of people under eighteen with yeah okay so mm it was a few years 
ago but you do 
forget and and you need to try and keep those as sensible as possible but as i 
mentioned it's variables across the top observations down the side er and then 
you'll be er safe in in analysing this see some ninety-nines in there that's 
missing data as long as ninety-nine is not a valid observation you can use 
something like ninety-nine for missing data S-P-S-S incidentally prefers you to 
use a er full stop for missing data you could always get Excel to change the 
ninety-nines to full stops again i think this is probably harking back to the 
old punch card days when i think minus-ninety-nine was the thing that they used 
as something that would be unlikely to occur anywhere else and so all the 
variables are across there there was one er open-ended question and and you see 
they've the researchers have noted down the responses basically to the open-
ended question but that needs some sort of post er analysis i'm not going to c-,
this is part of this presentation but 
namex was basically talking to you about this last time scaling being used to 
estimate the extent of somebody's predisposition to act or their attitude er 
and i think you covered that are there any questions on how you ask questions 
right we'll move on and in some ways this is moving back because er what i want 
to talk about now is qualitative getting getting hold of qualitative 
information there are a number of different ways these aren't in your notes but 
i will add them to the web site there are a number of ways does anyone get 
frustrated with this paperclip by the way 
ss: mm 
sm0985: 
nm0976: it needs to be turned off and i never know how to do it so i'll just 
get it out of the way er qualitative research as i say is quite often used as a 
precursor to quantitative research partly to reassure yourself that you're 
asking the right questions so you use qualitative research in a in an 
exploratory way and it helps to sort of frame the types of questions you're 
going to ask there 
are essentially three broad methods of or broad schools of thought with respect 
to qualitative research and by far the most important method and of course 
these are sort of er themes as well is the whole idea surrounding focus groups 
and focus groups are by far these days by far the most er used form of 
qualitative research but you also hear of with y-, the-, there are also there's 
also the possibility of conducting depth interviews which i'll say a little bit 
about in a moment and then there's a a area of research called motivational 
research which in some ways can be used as part of these two so we'll just deal 
with we'll deal with these first get them out of the way and then talk about 
focus groups just to repeat the objective of carrying out er qualitative 
research is really to generate ideas things like background information on a 
problem or a topic identifying concepts so concept identification i will as i 
said put some notes up that refer to this identifying relevant behaviour 
patterns and themes in the way people's b-, people behave establishing 
priorities how people 
rate certain things or how important things are to people in a qualitative way 
preliminary screening focus groups and qualitative research are used a lot in 
screening product ideas new product development as you'll hear from namex in 
due course is a [laugh] is a sort of inexact science in that they use very 
detailed scientific methods er but it's said in the food industry that eighty 
per cent of new product introductions fail er now not all of those will reach 
the the retailer Marks and Spencer's are famous for example of actually not 
test marketing Marks and Spencer's basically test market by putting products in 
store and so new product ideas like er M and S are famous for ready meals and 
so on they they basically put them in store see how they go and if they're no 
good they pull them again so there's as it it's a relatively er inexact science 
but a lot of products fail focus groups however are used sorry er qualitative 
research however is used to try 
to er ensure that that doesn't happen so screening of products and concept 
testing is very important er area of this also post research investigations in 
other words to sort of back up the results of a survey you might well conduct 
some further qualitative research piloting as i mentioned my pilot 
questionnaires during the qualitative phase and as i also said er talking about 
personal issues and personal questions they will be easier to do with some form 
of qualitative research now depth interviews just to get them out of the way 
depth interviews are exactly as they sound er relatively long relatively er 
well very personal in other words it's just one person plus the interviewer 
trying to uncover people's often people's motivations people's attitudes and so 
on highly expensive of course 'cause it's very intensive you need a highly 
trained interviewer to do it to do it and extremely difficult to evaluate the 
consequences because each respondent basically has a a write-up of a rather 
conventionally rather long discussion so depth interviews i think to 
some extent are waning in in er popularity amongst market researchers focus 
groups are not the Blair government er has popularized focus group use in the U-
K in the sense that they were very er open about having used focus groups to 
try to find out what sort of image they ought to put across so things like 
image image of a political party is something that lends itself very well to a 
focus group discussion a focus group and i'll show you two examples in a moment 
is usually a relatively small number of people between six and ten eight being 
the probably the optimum in most cases participants are brought together under 
the direction of a group leader of some sort er a trained person who is usually 
referred to as the moderator of the focus group in fact to call them the leader 
is probably wrong they are the moderator they're trying to moderate a 
discussion between eight people and moderation means that they shouldn't really 
be too involved in it ideally a good 
focus group would last for an hour and a half and the moderator wouldn't n-, 
need to intervene at all that doesn't often happen because there needs to be 
some introduction there needs to be some direction as you'll see in a second 
the group the m-, the moderator should be just that they shouldn't intervene in 
the discussion they're not there to be part of the discussion quite often other 
members of a research team want to be involved in the focus group they'll say 
oh i'll sit in but that can distort the discussion as well it s-, it should be 
very genuinely a an independent discussion between eight people who are er 
genuine respondents the leader has various sorry the moderator has various er 
functions the moderator has got to make sure the discussion follows the route 
that it's supposed to but they need to do this in a relatively subtle way we 
did some work as you'll see looking at the attitudes of consumers to British 
meat products er now we were actually 
looking at the attitudes of Belgian consumers to British meat products er for 
the Meat and Livestock Commission who at the time of the B-S-E the height of 
the B-S-E affair were facing an export ban on beef and therefore were looking 
at the er prospects for other products like er lamb and pork so we were looking 
particularly at those products er we didn't we or the the research team did not 
go straight into a focus group and say right we're going to talk about British 
meat because what we wanted to do was to get people's confidence and to build 
up their er or build up rapport with them so er okay they knew it was about 
food consumption er what you ideally want in a focus group is for people to 
lead you so if you're the moderator and there's a group of people chatting away 
about something and somebody says oh i'm not very keen on British meat that is 
your cue to bring them in and to s-, start the the subject going on rather than 
saying right it's you know it's half past twelve now we're going to talk about 
British meat you want 
to let people er guide you in some ways and the and the skill of the 
moderator's in recognizing those signs and making sure that er they're picked 
up on and the the discussion is er or follows a a particular course focus 
groups are popular for lots of perfectly valid reasons in some ways they're 
relatively cheap certainly compared with individual interviews it's relatively 
cheap to get eight people together even so the going rate at the moment for 
participation in focus group is about twenty-five quid we're trying to recruit 
some people at the moment and twenty-five quid is er seen as a reasonable rate 
to pay people for a couple of hours of their time if you're doing this for a 
professional agency you probably also pay travel expenses and so on you've got 
to hire a facility there's one in Reading called Sight and Sound typical 
facility would be probably about the a room about this size but from here to 
the wall would be split off and there'd be a big er single 
way mirror in the wall and the research group can sit behind the mirror and 
observe what's going on in the in the room sometimes video is used m-, more 
often than not video is used either in addition to that or instead of it so 
focus groups are tape recorded they're videoed and er this this facility in 
Reading is extremely good and you can you can watch as a member of the research 
team market research code of ethics says that people have to be informed that 
the research team is sitting behind the mirror er which i think is fair enough 
and as as the moderator says this they say oh you know you ought to know that 
behind that wall there's a few people there obser-, a-, and focus group goes 
completely quiet and oh my God you know can't you know can't put up with that 
and within five minutes they've completely forgotten about it as is as they've 
forgotten about the fact they're being videoed er and then after two hours you 
sort of introduce yourselves to them and like 
oh yeah i forgot about you er focus groups have these important advantages the 
main advantage of a focus group over an individual interview is that there is 
interaction people stimulate ideas off each other and that is the main er the 
main advantage people are interacting with each other it's very dynamic they 
can er prompt each other they can decide er sorry they can they can er grou or 
the group dynamic means that the er information you gain tends to be richer it 
fosters creativity and they start thinking provided it's well moderated there's 
nothing worse than a focus group that is er badly mor-, moderated i want to 
show you two examples one that i consider is reasonable and one that's er not 
so good er but yeah the m-, the moderator is there to guide it moderator's also 
there to bring people out who are not participating or to shut somebody up who 
is participating too much and it's a question of trying to get the views of 
everybody good focus group spontaneity candour 
can produce really good results after the focus group you need to write the 
thing up it needs a either a full transcription or some kind of summary of it 
er the the people who did this work in Belgium were they in fact conducted ten 
focus groups five in the French speaking part of Belgium five in the English 
speaking part sorry in the Flemish speaking part and er the write-up of ten 
focus groups is not a trivial task these things some of them lasted three hours 
so it's it's it's a fairly large er undertaking but the information you can get 
is very rich what you can't say is that we conducted ten focus groups there 
were eight people in each one and therefore er we've got eighty respondents and 
that's a valid sample and you start doing statistical analysis that is not the 
idea it's exploratory only it's giving ideas and the output that they this 
group produced for the Meat and Livestock Commission were just basic ideas on 
how you might market British er lamb and pork in 
Belgium i'll show you first of all what i think is not the best example er of 
how to conduct a focus group can you namex can you pull that blind right down 
and could you pull those blinds down as well please 
nm0976: right now i can't see what is happening so [laughter] 
nm0976: that was inspired timing they start talking about S-P-S-S this was er 
work that was conducted actually for Microsoft trying to find out i think this 
w-, one is in Birmingham you probably judge by the accents in a minute er and 
it was trying to find out what people thought of Microsoft software and it was 
a couple of years ago so some of it's a bit a bit dated you'll find i think 
that the room looks a bit cramped it's not an ideal location and i don't know 
if i've picked out the right bit but you'll you'll find that the moderator i 
think tends to be very intrusive and he certainly at points leads the 
respondents on and it's more like a question and answer session really than a 
discussion 
this is the moderator standing at the front bit like a sort of school teacher 
writing things up on a er flipchart but you find that each time one of them 
talks they're talking to the moderator which is not the idea at all they should 
be talking to each other moderator has a rather tedious voice as well which 
doesn't i think help but that's a sort of typical scene little rules simple 
things like you don't it's better not to serve alcohol because after two or 
three hours particularly with groups of men er you tend to get slightly excited 
respondents and it doesn't necessarily ne-, lead to good answers focus groups 
with men are decidedly more difficult than focus groups with women particularly 
on food er what we found with this Belgium work for example we were looking at 
among other things we were looking at ready meals and we were asking for 
people's impressions of packages of ready meal pork and and lamb and er women 
i'm i'm now doing what i told you not to do i'm 
generalizing over ten focus groups when you you're not supposed to do that but 
in general the Belgian women er talked about the product and talked about you 
know what they would do with it how they would cook it and the sort of image 
and so on the ideas that er it gave them the men the Belgian men and we had two 
groups of men were obsessed with the package and technical details of the 
package and oh yeah this is gas atmospheric packaging and you know and it it 
rises here because there's the product is you know two or three days old and 
it's giving off some blah blah blah and and we got quite distorted results 
because the males didn't appear to want to talk about the product itself and 
the image which is what we were looking for okay that's one example you see 
they're very static the people are very static the moderator is standing there 
and and making notes now this is an alternative approach now 
sm0980: would that have been because of the people there didn't know each other 
er er they were not comfortable speaking because 
nm0976: i think 
sm0980: although some people 
nm0976: yeah 
sm0980: 
nm0976: you you would aim to include people who don't know each other 
in the sort of random sampling kind of ideal er what quite often when we've 
done this on student projects and things and and it moderation certainly takes 
a bit of learning and so you're throwing somebody in at the deep end if you ask 
them to moderate a focus group without having sort of practised it or not done 
it before and people are most nervous about silence and you're right to start 
with every focus group is a bit stilted and you certainly start by sort of 
going round the room saying who are you and maybe asking a particular question 
of people er but more often than not people get talking er and that that's what 
you want 
sm0981: i suppose in the first guy was speak on like in the experience which 
you had in Belgium is that speaker speaking about this chemical reaction that's 
what has this thing to swell 
nm0976: i-, yeah no it does happen yeah 
sm0981: your comments then become 
nm0976: sure sure but it's the role of the moderator to try and bring people in 
and to to make sure it's a genuine discussion 
sm0982: 
nm0976: pardon [laughter] what did he say were people taking 
sm0982: 
nm0976: er i don't think in that one they were drinking alcohol it's certainly 
[laughter] er 
sm0983: er how how do you identify the respondents er especially given that 
it's small like a specialistic area 
nm0976: 
it's i mean the process that you use if you're working there there is a there's 
a commercial er side to this if you working for a commercial agency then they 
would use a commercial recruiting firm er and how these firms work the one we 
used in Belgium had fifteen-thousand on their panel and they were people whose 
demographic characteristics and sort of attitudes had been measured so that 
when we said we want people of a certain type and you know we want people who 
definitely eat lamb and pork then they could find these people for us otherwise 
it's sort of tramping the streets and trying to trying to get people it depends 
quite often we've used er if we haven't used a dedicated facility we've used 
like training rooms in supermarkets or something so you've recruited somebody 
from the supermarket or sorry recruited people from the supermarket but again 
it's it's a fair question and you're trying to get people with certain 
characteristics and recruitment is actually far more difficult than running the 
thing 
er here's a different example hope 
nm0976: this is something i want to mention in a minute the guy is handing out 
things to try to er he's actually handing out things and people are about to do 
have a little activity basically to sort of er reinforce the focus group let me 
just go back a bit and show you something else i just wanted to emphasize the 
difference of approach for the moderator incidentally those of you who're 
familiar with sort of participatory research approaches this is this is very 
much related to that and and participatory approaches to er looking into 
particular issues is is very much uses these kinds of techniques sometimes 
adapted but focus groups or group activities are very much to the fore now this 
guy insists on sitting on the floor basically er and his theory is that you 
should be at the same height or lower than your respondents now i just caught 
him when he was actually handing something out but the the Microsoft guy was 
sort of standing there like a 
school teacher this guy is very much trying to interact with people just you 
just have to watch him for a little while to see his sort of style he's trying 
to bring someone else in i think this is probably early on he's sort of going 
around the the room a bit it was noticeable that he didn't sit on the floor 
with the male group he basically was chatting these ladies up i think er but 
they they certainly [laughter] responded and the results were good very it's a 
very good facility this very very sort of comfortable and as you can see quite 
well appointed at that i'm not quite finding what i wanted to show you 
nm0976: you'll see on it we might not find it but you'll see on occasions that 
this guy if later on in the group where people start talking at the moment he's 
going round the room but people start talking he sort of stops them and and 
he's very he's very er sort of interactive but very physical with people but it 
s-, actually seemed to work very well er extremely experienced market 
researcher now the thing well i'll just leave it going you can keep an eye on 
it er the final thing that i wanted 
to mention was that a lot of qualitative research is impressionistic it is 
exploratory and there's a a a range of things under the title of motivational 
research that can be used to enhance group discussions of one sort or another 
and he was handing out cards where i think he got people into pairs to discuss 
a particular topic so it's sort of breaking things up and and there are various 
ways of doing that er so subgroup work or or er small group work is one way but 
motivational research was a sort of school of thought in the the U-S in the 
nineteen-fifties which took i mean there are there are lots also of sort of 
experimental ways of doing market research where you set up er you know er 
simulated shopping experiments and this kind of thing and experimental work is 
quite common but in the U-S in the in the fifties they really got into ma-, 
motivational research trying to uncover people's sort of hidden motivations 
there's lots of er references on the web site for that but just 
one or two techniques that are used in focus groups and other qualitative 
research to try to er enhance the the er experience things like simply oh still 
leave them going behind there is just sentence completion test this is i think 
it has two things it collects data it enables us to collect data but it also er 
gives people something to do and it breaks up the discussion and and if they've 
they've filled in this sort of thing they can then s-, sort of carry on with 
the discussion there are techniques like this and on the face of it it looks a 
bit sort of banal but in fact this sort of thing can produce extremely useful 
results so if you fill in what namex says and when i've done this with groups 
of students they usually well there are usually two th-, two types of responses 
one oh stick it into the NatWest bank you know they have a good interest rate 
and the other is go and blow it at the union on a Saturday night er but you get 
some impression as to how 
your respondents are thinking and how they're feeling about things 
personification or or er s-, story completion is another one now you may think 
this is a bit strange but in fact this will uncover lots of different er 
feelings that that people have about food it says once upon a time woman 
decided to invite some friends round to their house for dinner so and so went 
off to buy the food at this will say something about who's er who's the main 
food buyer and and whether there's any er implication about people coming for 
dinner so-and-so went off to buy the food they decided to serve what finishing 
off with what because blah blah blah the dinner went very well but a number of 
the guests began to feel unwell several had to go home early it was because of 
now when i've done this in the last two or three years food safety has sort of 
become this big issue so loads of people say they decided to serve beef and it 
was food poisoning probably caused by B-S-E 
well [laughter] it's not strictly accurate i think but quite often people put 
you know it's eggs which must have been caused by salm-, problem caused by 
salmonella and so on but i-, it in a qualitative way in an exploratory way it 
reveals a lot about the way people are thinking and of course this sort of 
thing is used for advertising all the time i'll just finish off with an example 
of exploratory re-, research and this is this is not personal experience it's p-
, pinched out of a textbook but it this is exploratory research which can as i 
say it's used for advertising a lot so you you can sort of turn people's 
answers into elements of your er advertising campaign let's just see what this 
chap's doing if we've got anywhere else er okay see what i mean he gets rather 
physical and stares into their eyes a lot right there are three people talking 
at the moment at some point he's got to calm this down a little bit and there 
you go he focuses in on one person if any of you are going to do 
focus groups as part of your dissertations or anything then he's recording the 
discussion he's hearing what they're saying 
sm0982: 
nm0976: well i i thought w-, what i was going to say was when three people are 
talking it's very difficult to establish what each one of them is saying and 
and that's another problem er but he's sort of got it calmed down again now as 
you can see
sm0983: er 
nm0976: this this was just 
sm0983: 
nm0976: this was a static camera it wasn't anybody writing anything down we 
were we were in another room it was relayed to us on a T-V screen so there was 
a static camera obviously up this end and it was actually quite a long way away 
from them they seemed to sort of get over any fears of being recorded er but 
yes i mean the transcription is after this and you use this as the basis of 
your transcription so just to finish off ideas for just just give you an idea 
of how qualitative research can help with er advertising so this was a an 
American study of er using open-ended questions as a way of sort of prompting 
people and making them think about things people who drive 
a convertible are factory workers usually drive most of the new cars are when i 
drive now if you if you are adverti-, think about it you're you're thinking of 
the sort of segments you're appealing to you need to you want to think about 
how people regard certain categories of of the public and what they drive and 
blah blah blah this might have been for some sort of market segmentation 
exercise or it might have been to try and establish people's responses to a 
particular vehicle but they were finding different responses from men and women 
so where the sentence stem was when you first get a car er this is horribly out 
of date and i'm sure it wouldn't happen these days women's responses you can't 
wait till you drive you would go for a ride you would take rides in it of 
course you would put gas and go places so it's all about what you'd do with the 
car er men you'd take good care of it you'd give it a good polish you check the 
engine now [laughter] er as i say i'm 
sure this was a few years back and it probably doesn't apply at all now but it 
actually resonates with what i was saying about our Belgian males and females 
er a car of your own pleasant convenient say women it's fine to have it's nice 
to have er men say i take good care of it it's a good thing it's absolutely a 
necessity so you get if you were an advertiser this would be really important 
and let's face it whatever you think about this and however out of date it is 
er gender is extremely important in advertising you could you can watch almost 
any er particularly T-V advert because they're the most visual and the most 
active you can watch almost any one and if you start thinking about what 
segment are they aiming at and what is the sort of message they're putting 
across you'll soon find that things like this become very important and you 
know if it's certainly in the U-K er and i think i mean cars is always a good 
example of this but you can i-, i'll i'll leave you to 
draw your own conclusion but you can look at car ads for things like the 
Renault Clio and Citroen Saxa and you could almost certainly identify a gender 
bias in that sort of advertising and same for different models so just keep an 
eye on that because er i can guarantee that almost every T-V advert is backed 
up by qualitative research of some sort where the researchers have tried to 
establish the sort of basic motivations that people have for dealing with that 
vehicle or 
sf0984: i was going to say that there's direct correlation between that and 
advertising cars is the new Fiat we've got the woman talking about the men the 
man's point of view er the man talking about the woman's point of view have you 
seen that one yet 
nm0976: right is that i mean the fi-, Fiat have have done a lot of this they 
had that spirito di punto thing for the Fiat Punto 
sf0984: mm 
nm0976: there's alwa-, there's often a male female thing in car i mean if you 
want sort of classic marketing texts you read something like er if there's a 
book called the hidden persuaders i think i've got it on a on a reference list 
somewhere by a guy called Vance 
Packard which again is about nineteen-fifties America about how car 
manufacturers persuade people to buy things and and i mean at that time if you 
think of American cars in the fifties and the sort of style and size and and 
shape of these things they were they were making very definite sort of 
psychological claims on people er and where you you know particularly sports 
cars and the sort of connotations that go with owning and driving a sports car 
which i'll leave to your imagination [laughter] but er you know it's a lot of 
it would be based on this sort of work definitely okay so it's conjoint 
analysis next week that's a way of designing new products basically common 
market research problem thanks can you pull the blinds up thanks