Submitted by Steve on Tue, 2008-12-16 01:11.

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending the Esomar Qualitative 2008 conference in Istanbul. In addition to attending, I served on the program committee for the conference and chaired a panel discussion on the impact of Web 2.0 on qualitative research which also included none other than the Revelation Nation's Nicole Reinhold!

So I thought I'd take a few moments and share some thoughts on the conference for the benefit of those who could not be there. So here are my quick hit thoughts:

1. Online has really arrived.

Compared to even two years ago when I presented at this conference, online has really become integrated into the fabric of qualitative research. Nearly every presentation and paper made reference to online methods in some way. Two years ago, online still did not seem completely accepted, but this year (I didn't attend last year) it seems that even more traditional qualitative researchers are acknowledging that online qual is here to stay and is rapidly becoming part of the standard toolkit.

What I felt most encouraging about the discussion of online was that people were staring to push past the hype of the technology and dig into more substantial thinking.  During our panel, both Nicole and I repeatedly encouraged attendees to think about online as a research medium that can support different methods vs a method in itself. I think the more technology is thought of as a tool for methodology, the better for qualitative research.

2. There's no consensus on best practices
One of the things that we talked about in the panel discussion is that there is really no best practices established for online qualitative. There is no RIVA for online qualitative, for instance and I came away thinking it's time for some best practices to be established, just like there are for focus groups and ethnography. That's not to say that things should be rigid and there's only one way to do things - but there are clearly conventions starting to arise from the work we are all doing. This will be a major focus for Revelation in 2009 as we build out our educational offerings.

3. Analysis needs more thinking
One of the most thought provoking presentation was given by Richard Radka who works for a company call Node.  He focused on analysis and I think what he had to say made a lot of sense and would resonate with folks in the Nation.  Essentially, Richard described analysis as messy, iterative, non-linear, tactile and collaborative. The thing that struck me most was the iterative part - analysis takes thinking over time.  To that end, Richard related that if he has the choice between collecting less data that he can analyze more fully, vs collecting more data that he can't analyze as fully, he would choose to collect less data.

I have been thinking about this a lot since the conference.  Often I am asked how many activities can participants do in a given time, and now I think the question is really as much about what the researcher can handle in terms of moderation and analysis. It's so easy to collect data, especially online, but there is no silver bullet for analysis - because it really does take time to process and think through the information and see the connections and patterns. We will be revisiting Revelation's analysis capabilities at the beginning of 2009 and this will definitely influence our approach.