Submitted by Steve on Tue, 2009-01-27 01:38.

With the release of our new group discussion activity here, we have been thinking quite a bit about online group interaction and its best uses. When qualitative came first came online, the idea was simply to replicating focus groups. The assumption was that group interaction was the whole idea of online qual. But from our point of view, as Web 1.0 evolved into Web 2.0, it became clear that the online medium is actually more effective at one on one in-depth qual then group interaction, at least in the context of online qualitative research. The ability to capture individual experiences on a vast scale in a short amount of time seems to be the true killer app of online qual.  And understanding human experiences in the context of a business question is really the mission of qualitative market research.

But group interaction is definitely something that can serve the research mission - after all, people wouldn't be doing all of those focus groups if they didn't.  In an online medium, where we can move from individual and group interactions and back to serve our needs, it's just a question of what objectives need to be served.  So here's where I think group discussion can be most effective in online qualitative.

I think it's a great way to reflect top line learnings back to participants to confirm your initial findings and explore further. So one way to do that is to follow several days of one on one activities with a group activity that presents initial findings to explore with the group.

Because group discussion activities are really two activities nested into one - respond to the researcher question, read other responses and comment - group discussion seem to generate the most activity when participants have a clear agenda to pursue. For example, a debate activity on the merits of credit vs. debit cards where people are assigned to argue their side.

Finally for longer projects, group discussions can be used to break long stretches of individual interactions - provided that doesn't bias participant in a way that would hurt the objectives of the study.  If people were to use it as a support group, then they might behave differently than they would naturally.

The key with group discussion is that group interaction is the primary point of the exercise - short, conversation-inducing questions are the way to go!