Welcome back. In the last lesson, we covered the good and the bad qualities for conducting qualitative research. I hope you move forward practicing the basic strokes of good qualitative research. You will get a chance to do that in this lesson, as we start putting what you have learned into practice. In this lesson, we will look at how to begin a qualitative investigation and how to start a secondary background research of a business problem or project. After this lesson, you will be able to describe how to begin qualitative investigation of a project, explain what is involved in secondary background research and how to start it. So let us go! Oftentimes, you will know absolutely nothing about a project that is given to you. Especially, if you work for a research firm or at a new company. You need to find out the basics. What has been done in the area prior? What do published or archived reports say about this type of project? Will my colleagues or friends know something about this? Has this venture been in the news, i.e., has something been published I can look up on the web? Lets say you are new to your job. You might want to go into the past files about what the office has done prior, or perhaps it's something a competitor already has on the market. You might want to do some research about what they've done and the response to the product by looking on the Internet. So you need to think about all the resources that can begin to tell you your story. You are now in the baby pool of research and getting your feet wet on the project. When I start qualitative investigation, I might start by doing the following. I might ask colleagues for advice. I might do a Google search to find reputable articles on the topic. I might check out what the competitors may have published or posted on the subject, or I may seek out a key informant as a resource. In your resource section, I gave you a Get Started with Qualitative Research Checklist. You can print that out and use it to practice initiating the qualitative research process, or whenever you need to do background research. Including, starting to do so for our business case scenario and research questions. Many items on the checklist may be familiar or self explanatory. However, finding key informants and persuading key opinion leaders to give you an interview, are specialized skills. You'll need to develop and use these while initiating qualitative research, so I will go into some detail on those topics. When you initiate qualitative research, you may want to conduct some in-depth interviews before doing a focus group. So first, you need to find people who are qualified to be your key informants, sometimes called KIs, or key opinion leaders, sometimes called KOLs. A key informant is somebody who has a lot of experience in whatever area you're researching. This could be a community leader who works with specific cultural practices or supervises an agency, or a key opinion leader is usually someone who is a high level executive, or someone who is sought after for their opinion, like a surgeon. So, the distinction between the two is, that the key opinion leader, or KOL, is usually very tough to get commit do the interview. But their opinion is extremely valuable to your project and you want to get that person to respond. This KOL may command a high incentive, but is essential to help you learn about the product or project at hand. For my research on immunizations, the key informants were community leaders within each of the demographics and county health officials. In this case, they did not require an incentive. For my research on spine clinics, the key informants were key opinion leaders in the form of spine and orthopedic surgeons. These people did require incentives. These people can provide their candid opinions about your business concept. Address hurdles or barriers they have in their daily interactions, as well as give general information about the population. So you start by identifying who you think may know what you need to know. In our course business case scenario, your key informant might be people from stores who sell the product. And key opinion leaders might be those who do the marketing for your stakeholder. In actuality, I would not suggest using key informants or KOLs for the business case scenario, only focus group research and a random survey. Let me share how I initiated qualitative research for a client, starting with seeking interviews with key opinion leaders. I had a client once who was initiating a legal service software product. They wanted to get the opinions of Chief General Counsel from Fortune 100 companies. I knew that these type of executives would be highly unlikely to want to do focus groups or fill out a questionnaire. One Chief Counsel I contacted had over 1,000 requests a day for research interviews. So I knew these people would be very difficult to get. But I also knew that I had to talk directly to these types of people rather than their secretary, who doesn't have the authority to purchase this type of service. The product was also still in the formation stage and needed to be tweaked depending on the specific types of lawyers these Chief General Counsel wanted to reach. So what did I know about this type of research and why did the client reach out to me? The answer was nothing. I knew nothing about software that connected lawyers to Chief General Counsel. I barely knew anything about how lawyers operate on a daily basis. I also didn't know how a Chief General Counsel decides on hiring other lawyers to handle their cases. I was at a total loss. What I did know, is how good I was at getting people to agree to be interviewed. It was the Barbara Walters in me. So I banked on my skills and how valuable those skills were. I even told the client that I have a 99% rate of getting people to do interviews. First thing I had to decide was how many interviews the company wanted. They told me they only wanted 10, I told them I could get them 20. They said they doubted it, but I said I was confident with my research skills. So, in that, I was able to sell them 20 interviews. So in the case of these tricky, hard to get interviews, I first had to put together a proposal that was priced to reflect the difficulty of the project. It needed to address objective costs, incentives to respondents, timeline, interviewer guide, and report. Like physician, these Chief General Counsel commanded a high incentive for doing the interview. Especially, since I would take up at least 30 minutes of their time. I also needed someone to go along with me to the interview, and that person had to be a tech person who could guide them through an explanation of the online product. Then, I made myself a target list of companies. I covered a variety of business types and geographies. I came up with some of the largest companies in various industries. Credit card industry, insurance, food industries, energy, airlines, hotels and so on. Then, I started making recruiting calls. If you were going through this initiation phase, you'd next develop a questionnaire for your targeted key informants and key opinion leaders. When I'm doing this, the questionnaire will first explain the objective, and that I would be audio and videotaping their responses. I also explained confidentiality of their responses and how I would use the information in a report. Then, I asked the respondent for background information about their job. In this case, I specifically wanted to know what types of legal cases they had where they had to choose a lawyer in another geographic region. I ask them how they go about making this choice. After that, I dove into specific questions about the product as we went through the demonstration. The goal was to understand how much the Chief General Council would use a system like this, rather than pick up the phone and make calls to colleagues. By the end of the interview, some of the respondents actually wanted to buy the product for their office, which was a bonus to the client. However, I was not a sales person. I was a researcher. And it made them be able to reply to the questions comfortably. Many express that the company should do sales in the form of research, and that is what I call, soft sell research. After that, I could provide the leads to the client. Once you have thought this through, or even practiced it on someone, then you would combine that with the other items on the Getting Started with the Qualitative Research Checklist. All that you have covered in this module will help you wade into qualitative research and acclimate as you begin the process. That concludes our lesson on beginning a qualitative investigation of a business problem or project. After this lesson, you should now be able to describe how to begin qualitative investigation of a problem or project, explain how to start secondary background research on a project. And discuss using interviews with key informants and key opinion leaders as part of initiating a qualitative market research project.
