OPINION27 January 2010

Encouraging co-creation between research and respondents

Getting consumers to co-create products and advertising campaigns is gaining traction – but what about co-creation in a research setting? Can respondents play a bigger role in the design and development of research tools, techniques and projects themselves?

Getting consumers to co-create products and advertising campaigns is gaining traction – but what about co-creation in a research setting? Can respondents play a bigger role in the design and development of research tools, techniques and projects themselves?

InSites Consulting blogged today about a new quality control initiative they’ve put in place that aims to make sure translations in multi-country surveys are up to scratch.

The company is recruiting small groups of panel members in certain countries to check that questionnaires are properly translated, that questions are formulated correctly and that the range of possible answers are appropriate for the market in question.

It’s nothing that a professional translations company couldn’t do, but it seems a neat way of expanding on the respondent experience to make them feel like a more integral part of the research process.

InSites calls these translation-checkers ‘The Watsons’, named after the sidekick of the fictional Victorian detective Sherlock Holmes – neatly summed up in a Wikipedia entry as the perfect foil for Holmes: “The ordinary man against the brilliant, emotionally-detached analytical machine”.

Sam Berteloot, InSites’ panel research director, explained in a conversation earlier today how the company also calls on the ordinary men and women of its panels to give feedback on new survey devices before they are introduced.

“The co-creation of surveys and tools with ‘real participants’ is crucial, as clients and research agencies might be biased due to their involvement,” says the company.

Note the use of the word ‘participants’ – which ties in with some comments I spied elsewhere this morning. Matt Foley of online community developer PluggedIN blogged about his wish to do away with the term ‘respondent’ and the slightly negative connotations it carries.

A valid point, perhaps – but I’d say to worry less about what you call your survey takers, and think more about how to make them real participants in the research process.

Brian Tarran

@RESEARCH LIVE

4 Comments

Maury Giles

14 years ago

Love the idea. Wondering if it has applications within an actual study beyond a questionnaire development or translation. For example, in an ethnographic type study might you engage the participant directly in an exercise to convey the purpose for the study and brainstorm what other observed interactions might address it, etc. Or, down another path... might you develop a questionnaire in which questions are proposed and reacted to and answered by the same group of people. Very interesting... thanks for sharing.

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Annie Pettit @LoveStats

14 years ago

I really think that co-creation is an idea that needs to be internalized by researchers. We talk about it all the time, but you rarely see it really implemented. From my perspective, it means actually sharing research results with participants/contributors. You don't need to share the proprietary information but there is usually a huge amount of interesting findings that responders would love to see. I bet we would see a huge shift in people's perceptions and a huge shift in survey response rates if we made a really good effort in this.

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Sam Berteloot

14 years ago

Hi Maury and Annie, just saw your reactions only now ... as for sharing results we, at InSites Consulting/TalkToChange try to share as much as possible. We have a philosophy that we try to get to our clients, of sharing feedback. It's not always easy but step by step we manage to move forward. I'm sure in terms of co-creation we can move in a lot of ways, we only need to find a way that works for both the participant and the research. (and the client) Sam

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Keith meadows

14 years ago

Just come across these intersting comments as I'm currently looking at co-creation as an approach in the development of health-related questionnaires for children and parents. Following on from Maury's point, I'm starting at an earlier stage where there is a need to identify the conceptual framework from which the questions are generated and from there to be confident in the content validity of the questionnaire. This is a move away from the traditional approach to developing health-related questionnaires using groups and depths and where the resulting output is generated by the researcher following content analysis.

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