Exploring Comments Interactively

The worlds of Qualitative and Quantitative Research have found an area of investigation where the techniques of the two forms intersect.  The intersection occurs when the research design admittedly cannot be said to be a representative sample, and so must be Qualitative.  Further, like “classic” Qualitative from focus groups or in-depth interviews, the information gathered is largely from open-ended comments.  Relatively new sources of such comments include Facebook Fan pages, Market Research Online Communities (MROC), certain Twitter feeds and a variety of other social media threads that generate such comments.

The sheer amount of comments from such a source creates the need to cope with the data in a fashion akin to Quantitative Research.  Let's say there’s 500 positive comments and 300 unfavorable comments - are we supposed to read them as “quotes” as if reading a typical Qualitative report?  Is the analyst supposed to be content with vague terms like “most” and “many of” to express the relative size of various kinds of comments? In a recent forum one researcher, clearly from the Qualitative tradition, said of his MROC that the sheer volume of comments was “like drinking from a fire hose.”

No, it seems more reasonable to apply tested Quantitative tools, such as coding, to such a database.  Yet coding has always had a fault:  the coding process tends to strip the emotion from the original comments. We recently coded comments by moviegoers concerning True Grit (Comment Explorer Movie Map).  One comment was “Damon is such a versatile actor,” and similar praise was “I am glad he is getting Supporting Actor nomination buzz as well for this most offbeat role.”  The code point in which these and similar comments reside is Solid/Oscar-worthy performance.  A good code point, but the pizzazz of the original quotes has been abstracted almost to the point of feeling empty of emotion.  That’s off-putting: a key benefit of Qualitative Research has always been the ability to bring the consumer’s emotion face-to-face with our Marketing, Advertising and Operations end-clients.

I’m now presenting in meetings where every audience member has an open laptop (or tablet) before them.  They’re intending to do other work, of course.  Let’s start putting our information on those screens instead, allowing our audience to guide themselves to a better understanding of what we’ve discovered for them. - Paul D. Cragin