Abstract:

Establishing what drives behaviour, motivates change, or what a future might look like, is not as simple as asking people the question. To address different kinds of questions qualitative market research generates different kinds of data, uses different rules of evidence and standards of proof ... and often moves between different knowledge paradigms without self-consciously recognising it. This agility underlies some of the real successes of the informed decision making that qualitative market research is all about, but making the wrong leap at the wrong moment or conversely failing to leap at all can be disastrous. This presentation aims to codify some of the major knowledge paradigms that QMR works with.