Prevent IDI Project Issues by Aligning on Interview Style (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Hi friends, I'm Katherine Korostoff and today I'd like to have a conversation about a qualitative research methodology, one that we all love and use frequently. And I'd like to talk about a problem that we sometimes have with this methodology that we don't really talk a lot about. So what I'm referring to is that when we do in-depth interviews, that is when we're doing IDI projects, we obviously are going to have a lot of things that we need to do to make sure that project goes well. We need to make sure we have documented objectives that make sense and that everybody agrees to. We need to design a screener that's going to get us to appropriately qualified participants. And we need to have a great discussion guide that's going to appropriately help us collect the information and meet the stated project objectives. Now each of those steps can hit some roadblocks along the way. Sometimes we have to go through a few more iterations perhaps than we had liked. But when we get there, when we've got the objective, the screener, and the discussion guide, the part we don't talk enough about is the topic of what happens at day one when that first interview is done. So you've done all the pre-work, everything is set up, everybody's aligned, but this is where really we start to see the benefit and the value of the research. So the first interview starts and maybe you have clients or stakeholders who are remote monitoring that interview. They might be remote monitoring live or they might be looking afterwards. Have you ever had a situation where after the first one or two IDIs you hear that somebody's not happy with how the IDI is going? Now maybe you're not even the moderator yourself. Maybe you're managing the moderator or the moderator is a colleague or a contractor that you're working with, but you hear from the client that they're not happy. So we've had the great objective, we've designed the project with excellence, everybody's aligned on the screener and the discussion guide, but when we start actually collecting the data we hear that the client or the stakeholder is not happy. And I think that this is a very uncomfortable situation and maybe that's why we don't really talk about it as candidly as I think we should be as a profession. Now there can be obviously a number of different reasons why the client and the moderator might be having a disconnect, but in my experience there's actually usually one root cause and that is that there's a disconnect on the style that this IDI was supposed to have. In market research sometimes we're doing projects where we're collecting a fair amount of factual information. I might be doing IDIs in a project where I really do need to collect some deep factual information. It might feel a little dry for an IDI, but sometimes we need that context before we can ask the deeper questions. And so we might have some projects where it's a highly structured discussion guide, where for say a 60 minute IDI I might have 40 or 45 questions that I'm supposed to get through. Now again that might be appropriate for that particular type of project, but sometimes you have a researcher who's just not that great at interviewing in that technique. They are somebody who is going to do better with more of a semi-structured interview guide. So here's a case where maybe the disconnect is because the client was expecting this to be a highly structured interview where every question in the discussion guide was going to get addressed and that the researcher was going to complete every question in that interview guide no matter what and still come and still close in 60 minutes, right? But then you have the other opposite scenario. Sometimes you have the client who's just the opposite. You hear that maybe they're not happy with what's going on in the IDI because they don't feel you're probing enough. They feel like you're reading the interview guide like a script, that you're being too robotic, that you're not showing active listening skills, that you're not taking the time perhaps to establish the rapport that we know we need in order to get research participants to really reveal things to us about their reactions and their feelings and their personal behaviors that might be relevant to the research. So there's really two different kinds of IDIs. Sometimes we need a highly structured IDI with a highly structured guide and an interviewer who is really good at managing those situations, making sure that all of the questions are asked and keeping things on time. But sometimes we're doing IDIs where we need depth, where we're really looking for the interview to help us discover and explore customer attitudes, perceptions, behaviors. You know, for example, let's say you were about to do 20 in-depth interviews and the topic was going to be vacuum cleaners. Now that might seem like a kind of a very factual type of topic but actually things that you use in your home can get very deep very quickly. So in one case somebody might be doing IDIs about vacuum cleaners but they really need to collect a lot of information about what's going on in that home. So in the interview they're going to collect a lot of factual information but maybe it's a case where they really understand who their target market is, they don't need to ask a lot of factual information in the interview itself, and so they're getting to really explore people's feelings about using vacuum cleaners, what the experience is, and that's where we get to the discovery. So in our hypothetical example we might hear that a lot of people have very strong nostalgia associated with vacuum cleaners. They remember their mother, their grandmother, their father, their grandfather, somebody else vacuuming when they were a child. Or maybe they have memories of how their animal enjoyed chasing the vacuum cleaner when it was on. Or I think we've all heard of cases where the robotic vacuum cleaner really freaks out the cat but everybody secretly enjoys watching this for entertainment value. So if we have the time to explore people's feelings, behaviors, experiences, that's where we can get some of the really rich depth that can be important if I'm trying to understand customer needs, messaging opportunities, new product opportunities, etc. That's going to come from the semi-structured interview guide and when you have a semi-structured interview guide you have far fewer questions. So in a 60-minute interview you might have only 10 or 15 questions and that's intentional because those are questions that are designed for rich conversation. We want to make sure that the interviewer or facilitator, moderator, as you prefer, is going to have time to clarify and probe. And if I've got a good question, especially a question where I'm asking people to share an experience they've had with a specific product, you know, tell me about your earliest memories of having a vacuum cleaner or seeing a vacuum cleaner used in your home. If you are clarifying and probing, that one simple question could easily take three to five minutes. If you're accepting a five-word answer and moving on to the next question you've lost that opportunity to get to the depth. So a good facilitator, interviewer, moderator knows how to get there. They are a very different style of moderator than the person who really does well in the more structured, highly structured interview guide. So if I've got a project where I know I need real exploration, I need real discovery, I have to give the interviewer time to do that. They have to have time to clarify and probe. There are a lot of best practices here. We know what we have to do in order for us to get to that level of discovery. There are different techniques that we use. One common category of techniques, of course, is projective techniques. There are different things that we can do to get to that depth, but not every step of all of those things can be pre-scripted. We have to give the interviewer the chance to have some in-the-moment control of what they're going to say and how they're going to tackle it in order for them to get to the real depth. But here's the catch. The people who excel at doing highly structured interviews are not always the same people who do well at semi-structured interviews. And not all projects need semi-structured. Some need highly structured. Some projects really need the semi-structured. So a lot of the times when I hear that there's unhappiness between an interviewer and their client, I find that it's because there wasn't an upfront conversation to be super precise. Are these highly structured interviews? Are you going to expect me to cover 50 questions in 60 minutes? Or is this a semi- structured interview where I'm going to have some leeway to bring in different techniques so that I can really get into the exploration, that I can really discover attitudes, behaviors, experiences that are ultimately going to feed our research objectives? I think that if we can be really honest with each other about what we need and who has those skills, it would solve a lot of headaches. Now here's the other thing that I'm not going to win any popularity prizes for, but it has to be said. I know that a lot of times we want to think that every moderator, every IDI facilitator can easily do both highly structured and semi-structured interviews. I know that that's something that a lot of people want to believe. I have to be honest, in my experience of doing this kind of work for over 30 years now, it's not the case. Some people are good at highly structured. Some people are really good at semi-structured. It's very, very rare to find somebody who can equally do both. And so part of the onus is on the client, or the stakeholder, or whoever's planning the project to decide up front, is this a project where I really need something that's highly structured or semi- structured? And then engage your moderator accordingly. I think if we can have an honest conversation about that, we'd see fewer problems and fewer mismatches that frankly don't serve the client or serve the moderator. And so I would encourage a pause before we go too far into a project to have that conversation and make sure it's documented so that there's no misalignment. You can't have it both ways. So the onus is somewhat on the client or the stakeholder or the project manager to document a decision. This is a project where we do need to get through 50 questions in 60 minutes. Or this is a project where we're really looking for discovery and exploration. And so we reasonably need to give our appropriately qualified moderator enough time for those exercises. If you're preparing for an IDI project, don't skip this alignment step. Talk about the style of the research that you need. Talk about your need for depth. Talk about whatever other criteria you have for selecting the right moderator for this project. And if you're looking for moderators who are vetted for specific strengths, structured, unstructured, or a mix of both, please do check out our Renter Researcher Staffing Service and you can find more information about our 150 plus fully vetted researchers at researchrockstar.com or in the show notes. Thanks.