EphMRA Conference Paper
Jon Chandler
Peter Winters
24 Nov, 2005
ALERT: Going beyond “research as we know it”
Athens
21 Jun, 2006–23 Jun, 2006
Jon Chandler & Peter Winters have been accepted to speak at the 2006 EphMRA Conference on the subject of “Going beyond ‘research as we know it’”. The theme of the conference is “Truths, Myths & the Future : Challenging Ideas”. More details of the paper are shown below.
Paper title: Going beyond “research as we know it”
Session: Session Three – Methodology
Names of presenters: Jon Chandler & Peter Winters
From its early days the Internet has intrigued researchers who have instinctively recognised it as rich in potential as a research vehicle.
This intrigue has in turn given rise to a variety of myths; the Internet as the future vehicle for group discussions or the Internet as the new vehicle for quantitative research.
In this case the myths were part fantasy and part reality. The Internet has been increasingly used as the vehicle through which some quantitative research has been conducted. Various experiments in qualitative research over the Internet have been tried, but this has yet to show any sign of seriously displacing more mainstream qualitative research.
Many of these endeavours have seen the Internet as a new vehicle through which to conduct old research. This is particularly the case in the sector where the Internet has so far been most fruitful in research terms, quantitative research. Here research questionnaires that were once administered by interviewers, face to face or over the telephone, are now conducted via the Internet. The benefits of this approach seem clear; cutting out the interviewer saves costs, saves on recording errors and increases turnaround time. However this use of the Internet as a research vehicle remains “research as we know it”, it may be cheaper and more efficient but in terms of fundamentals it isn’t anything new.
This paper will look at the potential of research via the Internet from a broader perspective and ask what the Internet can offer us if we cast off our impulses to simply use this as a way of doing what was done before. Here we will look at some of the potential offered by this new research medium, particularly in terms of styles of research that fall outside of the old qualitative and quantitative research paradigms.
This paper will attempt to work at two distinct levels:
- One level will be abstract and philosophical; it will attempt to define the ways in which this new technology offers new possibilities for what can be done in research. We will attempt to define some boundaries here and identify the constraints.
- A second level will be very concrete and will present results and illustrations from research studies using the Internet amongst Doctors and employing new approaches to Internet research. Most notably this will include variations on and developments out of some of the creative, projective and enabling techniques more characteristic of qualitative research. Specifically for this paper, original Internet research will be conducted amongst doctors that will explore doctors’ emotional associations with various pharmaceutical brands and how this could be used to guide pharmaceutical brand development.
The key take-away message of this paper is that we should think about going beyond “research as we know it”; particularly with regard to using enabling techniques with Internet research.
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