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Qualitative surveys

What is it?

Where a quantitative survey seeks to ‘quantify’ a topic through numbers and statistics, a qualitative survey looks to ‘qualify’ the response with more subjective opinion. A qualitative survey helps you to understand the underlying reasons and motivations behind a target group’s actions and behaviours.

For example, if you were thinking about changing your corporate livery or branding it would be wise to conduct some qualitative research beforehand to establish how strongly or otherwise your market felt about your current branding as well as the impressions and emotional reactions they have to the new branding.

Potentially you get access to much more nuanced and detailed information about how a target group thinks, feels and acts regarding a particular product or topic. Where quantitative surveys may tell you the percentage of your audience that hate your product or are unhappy with delivery changes, the qualitative survey will tell you why. It’s the why that helps to define the problem and find appropriate solutions.

As a result, this type of research is particularly useful for identifying issues and helping to come up with ideas and hypotheses to test to solve those issues.

It is, however, more complex to analyse because the information that is provided is unstructured and does not tick a box or prescribe to any rules. This means that to extract useful insights from qualitative surveys you may have to invest in text-based analysis (see Chapter 8) or sentiment analysis (see Chapter 9).

Why does it matter?

It matters because qualitative surveys provide greater subjective input around a particular change, problem or topic.

They are not as structured as quantitative surveys because the real value comes from the ability of the respondents to say exactly what they want rather than select the best answer from a prescribed list.

This more detailed and personal information can help to really understand an issue from the respondent’s point of view, help generate ideas for improvement, and uncover trends in thought and opinion.

How can I use it in practice?

Qualitative surveys and questionnaires are ideal for understanding more about how someone thinks and feels about a topic. They are by definition exploratory and are ideal when you don’t know what you will discover.

They are especially useful if you want to know:

  • What your customers think and feel about your product or service.
  • How your customers decide between your different products or between you and your competition. What motivates them to choose you?
  • How your branding, design and packaging influences your customers for and against certain products and services.
  • What marketing messages or advertising has the most impact on your customers and prospects – both positively and negatively.
  • How your pricing affects buying behaviour.

How do I get started?

As with quantitative surveys, you need to know what questions you are seeking answers to and design the survey around those strategically important questions.

The guidelines for quantitative surveys (see Chapter 19) are also relevant for qualitative surveys

Once you’ve designed your survey consider distributing it online. Most qualitative surveys are conducted online via web-based surveys such as Survey Monkey to aid in the collection and analysis of results. They can also be conducted over the phone, by post or face to face but this tends to be more expensive because the results must then also be input into an analytics tool.

Possible data sources

The data comes directly from specially created qualitative surveys.

These surveys can be administered face to face via interview or over the phone. Or they can be sent out through the post or conducted using online web-based or mobile tools.

How difficult or costly is it to collect?

This will depend on how big the survey is and how it’s conducted. Like the quantitative survey it will be more expensive if you decide to hire researchers to ask questions face to face, print and post a questionnaire, or telephone respondents. In postal survey’s all the responses will also still need to be input into a program for analysis so this is usually an additional labour cost.

The most cost-effective approach is to use an online web-based tool which distributes the survey and directly inputs responses into a program that will then collect the data for analysis and may also analyse it.

Practical example

Qualitative surveys are often used to help companies find out more about their customers. Say you notice on social media that a few of your customers are unhappy about the service your company is providing. There are a few derogatory tweets and Facebook posts. You’re a smart business leader so you don’t want to ignore these and are keen to figure out if this is just a few isolated incidents or an indication of a wider problem.

You could use a qualitative survey to tease out opinion so that you can isolate where the issues are and find a relevant solution. The challenge with qualitative surveys is that the questions are open-ended which means that the recipient can say whatever they want. Open-ended questions can yield open-ended answers that are not very useful. For example, if you asked, ‘How was your last customer experience?’ the recipient could potentially reply ‘Good’ or ‘Terrible’, but neither is terribly helpful. Whereas if you asked your customers to describe their last purchasing experience with your company you are likely to get much more insightful information.

In order to ask the right questions you need to have an idea of what the problem might be so pay attention to any signals you’ve already received regarding any customer unhappiness and seek to clarify if your assumptions are correct.

Tips and traps

Keep the survey small as the data gathered can be unwieldy.

As with all surveys only ask questions that are genuinely useful or relevant to the matter at hand. Don’t be tempted to add more questions just because the answers ‘might be interesting’. Figure out what you are trying to find out and ask only the questions that will answer those queries.

To save time, money and potential survey overkill many companies are now incorporating both qualitative and quantitative elements in their surveys. Allow recipients to provide additional feedback should they want to so they have the opportunity to raise issues that are important to them but do not appear as a specific question on the survey.

Further reading and references

To find out more about conducting qualitative surveys see for example:

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