Under the Magnifying Glass
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Sat, Aug 21, 2010
Some highlights from the 314 unique links shared on #MRX this week.
What’s next for mobile research? asks Ava Austria. To answer that question, she interviews Frank-Thomas Naether, the Managing Director of NMRC, who said, “Mobile research is about ‘capturing the moment’. This is highly relevant when it comes to gaining insights into the decision making process of participants... Mobile Internet devices will become more and more central in everyone's life… Online tracking studies are an interesting possibility and GPS technology will offer additional valuable information on how, when and where people do what.”
Mappiness is one application demonstrating that potential. The London School of Economics has created this iPhone application to research how a person’s location and environment affects their happiness. Once or twice a day the application will alert the user to enter their current mood, who they are with, where they are, what they are doing and even upload a picture.
While Mappiness offers self-ethnography, a recent Best Paper Award from the first Qualitative Research seminar organized by Market Research Society of India (MRSI) celebrates traditional ethnography. “Building foresight through insights”, by Nirupama Kaushik and Reshma Paritosh of TNS India, makes the case for using ethnography to unlock new opportunities for innovation.
One ethnographic source for innovative ideas is exploring lies as an inspiration for design. When a respondent’s answers don’t match their actual behavior, determining why the respondent is lying, and what it says about what consumers value and expect as social norms, can provide powerful truths for consumer product development.
Of course, sometimes a respondent is lying, just for the sake of lying, as in this alternately humorous and disturbing video shared by Annie Pettit:
Annie asks, “How exactly is the data analyst going to handle data which is clearly horrible quality? Will the analyst think of checking for outliers in each question? Will the analyst review the entire set of responses to recognize that it is an across the board outlier and probably a troublemaker? Will these responses lead to completely invalid analysis and conclusions?”
Which is an excellent reminder that, whether you are conducting market research or creating a graph, it is always important to check the data, as Nathan Yau advocates. He writes, “Oftentimes, an anomaly is simply a typo, and other times it's actually an interesting point in your dataset and that forms the whole drive for your story. Just make sure you know which one it is.”
And once you know what it is, and have conducted as much analysis as appropriate, keep much of it to yourself. Share the most important messages, as Dan Womack argues in Getting Comfortable with Data Reduction: “If done well, our work typically produces an enormous amount of quality data (both qualitative and quantitative). Throwing out good data isn’t easy (Who wants to be wasteful during the Great Recession, right?) but that is one of our most important roles and that is what I’m suggesting we do more often.”
Well, I’m sharing only the top 10 out of 314 links. How’s that for omitting good data?
Top 10 #MRX Tweets
- RT @rinsights: Market Researchers Benefit From Learning Marketing http://bit.ly/cBvuUu #marketing #marketresearch
- RT @EliasVeris: Awesome research tool. Underline Awesome. And put it in bold. http://bit.ly/d1Se2X #mobileMR
- RT @mr_roi: "Butterflies don't innovate" http://bit.ly/aoTRdZ
- RT @lovestats: Laugh at yourself and then cry at our flailing industry: http://wp.me/pow9s-OE
- RT @MargaretRoller: Do we assume that our respondents lie? Embracing respondents' lies to our advantage http://bit.ly/btL6lO #MR
- RT @richshaw: Graphing rule #1 - check the data http://bit.ly/df0drK
- RT @merlien: Blog post: What's next for mobile research? http://bit.ly/ajMl0P #esomar #qrca #amsrs #mobileMR
- RT @spychresearch: Really rockin' post from Seth Godin, http://bit.ly/d1Wj87 : Foundation elements for modern businesses
- RT @mrnews: wonderful paper on ethnography from TNS--fantastic examples (via @ResearchRocks) http://bit.ly/cBOlkG
- RT @DanWomack: New Blog Post: Getting Comfortable With Data Reduction, http://bit.ly/cVRZnI