At BHI, the Validation team are great believers in the use of online research to provide brand sensitive research. With the majority of our quantitative studies using the internet as a research tool we are always looking for ways to improve the ‘online’ experience for our respondents to ensure that we can get the most out of our data.
Sheetal Padania 
23 Sep, 2008
What’s New in Online Research?
Due to exciting new advances in the software that are used for online studies, we are now better able to:
- Encourage respondent participation and maintain their interest (particularly important for the longer questionnaire!)
- Provide more detail and exact understanding of the topic of interest
- Incorporate the use of more qualitative techniques
Below we mention a few of the latest advances that are now available to us.
Active masking and piping: This tool enables us to display a number of questions on a single screen, each of which appears once the previous question has been answered. This is particularly useful when questions relate to respondents’ prior answers, or when we require respondents to answer an open-ended question based on their response to a closed-ended question.
The value of active masking and piping is that it allows respondents to see what they have previously selected, which encourages more accurate, logical and detailed answers. With this in mind, it can be a useful tool in many types of research. For example, when wanting to understand drivers behind prescribing behaviour, using active masking and piping, a survey can be designed to ask respondents to:
- select the factors that influence prescribing;
- select the factor that is most influential;
- answer (e.g. in a open-ended format) why this factor is most likely to drive their prescribing in comparison to the other factors they have selected
This not only provides a reminder to respondents of the answers that they previously selected, thus encouraging more accurate responses later in the survey, but it also gives respondents a sense of logic to the questionnaire. It enables them to better understand the flow of the questions and in turn is likely to maintain their interest and reduce their frustration in completing the survey. Other areas where this research tool is beneficial include understanding treatment pathways and algorithms and exploring product or patient profiles.
Card sort function: This technique is designed to enable respondents to drag and drop cards into boxes that allow them to be scored or ranked. It can be used to rate text, such as short messages, or images, such as brand logos. This feature is particularly useful in iconography research, in testing headlines and straplines of potential advertising concepts, and assessing a brand’s attributes. Its main benefit in these types of research is that it reduces the fatigue effects of online studies, thus ensuring a greater quality of responses as respondents are engaged in the questions and the answers they are providing. It also provides an innovative way of presenting questions, and is likely to maintain respondents’ interest – promoting the feeling that they are playing a game rather than completing a survey.
Highlighter text: The highlighter text technique is a relatively recent development in quantitative research that allows respondents to highlight, in different colours, information within a text that are of particular interest to them, are well received, or conversely that respondents are less sure about. This tool is especially useful for evaluating product profiles and testing communication materials. Compared to previous tools used in quantitative research to evaluate information about a brand, the highlighter text makes it easier for respondents to focus on the details, thus enabling us and our clients to understand which words, phrases and visuals are liked or disliked by respondents and which elements of the information are likely to encourage or impede future usage. In testing communication materials, for example, this feature, therefore, enables our clients to use robust data to fine-tune specific aspects of their sales aid, leave pieces or advertising concepts that have been highlighted by respondents as areas in need of improvement.
The research tools outlined in this article highlights just some of the advances that recent developments in online software can provide. Whilst those discussed here are more innovative and novel ways of conducting quantitative research, other tools have been designed to make online research easier for both respondents and our clients. We understand the importance of keeping up-to-date with all developments that will assist the smooth running of research projects, and test them thoroughly internally before using them in questionnaires for our clients.
So the next time you are looking to conduct quantitative research hopefully the above will provide guidance on the types of techniques that can be used to get the most out of your research.
Should you wish to discuss any of the points mentioned above, contact the Validation Team at BHI.
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