Common pitfalls in qualitative research and how to handle them with Alex Culshaw

On this episode of Now that’s Significant, a Market Research Podcast host Michael Howard, the head of marketing at Infotools, was joined by Alex Culshaw, Head of Qualitative Research at SparkMR. Alex has 20 years’ research experience in both the public and private sectors – in particular, the healthcare, B2B and consumer industries. Experienced in using traditional and new methods to bring rich and actionable insights to leading brands, such as 3M, SC Johnson, Husqvarna, Nestlé and many others, Alex specialises in online market research communities and the commercial application of Qualitative research, including models and frameworks for interpreting results.  On this episode, we discussed: The book qualitative research experienced when it comes to online communities, accelerated in part by Covid.  The boom is good news, but there are some unexpected difficulties requiring agile problem solving from researchers with this methodology.  Alex covers three common pitfalls that could trip up even the most experienced researcher plus how to avoid / overcome these. And they talked about a few tricks for accessing human truths in online qual research. We hope you enjoy the show. *** Infotools Harmoni is a fit-for-purpose market research analysis, visualization, and reporting platform that gives the world’s leading brands the tools they need to better understand their consumers, customers, organization, and market. Established in 1990, we work with some of the world’s top brands around the world, including Coca-Cola, Orange, Samsung, and Mondelēz. Our powerful cloud-based platform, Harmoni, is purpose-built for market research. From data processing to investigation, dashboards to collaboration, Harmoni is a true "data-to-decision-making" solution for in-house corporate insights teams and agencies. While we don't facilitate market research surveys, we make it easy for to find and share compelling insights that go over-and-above what stakeholders want, inspiring them to act decisively. One of the most powerful features of Harmoni is Discover is a time-tested, time-saving, and investigative approach to data analysis. Using automated analyses to reveal patterns and trends, Discover minimizes potential research bias by removing the need for requesting and manually analyzing scores of cumbersome crosstabs – often seeing what you can’t. Discover helps you easily find what differentiates groups that matter to you, uncover what makes them unique, and deliver data points that are interesting, relevant, and statistically significant, plus see things others can’t. Add to all this an impending GenAI feature, and you have an extremely powerful, future-proofed tool. Feel free to check out our platform and services at www.infotools.com