Truth, Lies and Videotape

Imagine asking a group of eight year olds to present the results of a study on children’s eating habits. Suppose you wrote in a report how annoying your teenage respondents were, because they wouldn’t stop mucking about. Think about asking a team of single mothers to conduct an important social research project on attitudes to childcare. Or maybe show a new consumer typology to the respondents it was based on, and ditch it if they say they don’t recognise themselves.

Commercial suicide for a researcher looking forward to early retirement, or a challenging, energising approach to inspire researchers and clients alike? These ideas come from recent thinking and controversy in academic ethnography and anthropology and I will argue that ongoing debates within academia are directly relevant to commercial market researchers in at least two ways. First, they address core problems of truth, objectivity and cultural understanding which are central to qualitative market research. Second, they also provide us with a source of new and more inspiring ways to help us conduct, analyse and present our research to clients.
 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 NEXT >>