Qual’s future’s bright, but is it online?

The debate was over before it even started. Kicking off the NewMR Virtual Festival webinar pitting online versus in-person qualitative research, advocates of both modes agreed that a combination of the two would be relied upon by clients in years to come, rather than one totally displacing the other.

It is inevitable, of course, that offline qual will lose ground to online in the coming years, just as face-to-face and telephone gave up market share in quant work. But both sides in the debate accepted that the choice of online and in-person approaches would remain, and which was used would depend on research objectives.

And so the panellists were left to argue over the amorphous point of which was best at meeting client needs for speed, quality, cost and depthand for creating respondent engagement. Here sharp divisions emerged.

Visionslive.com’s Andreiko Kerdemelidis, for the onliners, talked up the cost benefits, leaving Simon Patterson of QRi Consulting to point out in defence of the offliners that in-person costs have been driven down so much over the years there’s really little difference between the two approaches.

Patterson’s contention, though, was that the little more you pay for in-person qual brings with it a significant improvement in quality of output. Meeting people and talking with them face-to-face offers “unique benefits”, he said, not least the opportunity to discern non-verbal indicators of a person’s underlying emotions which they may have difficulty articulating – if they are even aware of them.

Tom De Ruyck of InSites Consulting, for the onliners, questioned this advantage, saying it was “an illusion to think that either online or in-person methods can get into people’s minds”. Online, he said, with its applications for sharing text, pictures and video, offers “more angles” from which to observe consumers to produce “a more holistic vision”. Chatting with them for two hours in a focus group can’t compare, said De Ruyck.

Both he and Julie Wittes Schlack of Communispace had earlier remarked how online communities allow for long-term relationships to be created with respondents and how this, over time, would lead to deeper engagement with the research and ultimately more in-depth consumer understanding.

“I would agree that [online] you can lose some of the nuance of a live interview,” said Wittes Schlack, but that loss is “more than compensated” by the longitudinal relationship.

But to compare online communites to offline focus groups is to compare “apples to pears” – synchronous to asynchronous studies – said moderator Joanna Chrzanowska. Independent quallie and in-person advocate Geoff Bayley here spied a weakness, and pounced.

Turning their argument against them, Bayley said the onliners were making the point that depth comes over the long-term, when the issue is that clients want speed and depth. Razor Research’s Eleanor Atton chimed in, damning online with the faint praise that it “can be uniquely powerful for getting snapshots of people’s lives”.

Later, as the debate turned to the issue of resistance to online methods, Atton challenged De Ruyck’s claim that traditionalists are loth to use online qual because “people fear the unknown”. She said that, to the contrary, she herself uses online methods and sees them as a complement to her in-person work – a point similarly made by Patterson at the outset of the debate.

Contentiously, Atton said: “We would challenge the onliners that they have a fear of offline.” Despite a spirited defence, it seems, the offliners couldn’t sway those listening. Chrzanowska was reluctant to call a clear winner from the online poll conducted at the conclusion of the debate, though it looked like a majority sided with the view that qual’s future was an internet-enabled one.