I once heard a historian remark that maps are like campfires: everybody gathers around them because they bring simplicity to the complex, and show us how to get where we’re going.

There’s no shortage of wisdom on the basics of qualitative research guides, but there are a few concepts that rarely get discussed. Regardless of the type of qualitative being conducted, ‘the guide’ is the roadmap. Depending on the methodology, it goes by different names: moderator’s guide, discussion guide, topic guide, interview guide, or activity guide. No matter—the same principles apply. So here are a few little-thought-of, but crucially important, ideas that must be understood and kept in mind when creating effective guides.  Keeping them in mind can lead you to breakthrough insights.

The guide must allow key topics to surface organically. I once conducted research for a new brand in an existing medication category that wanted to address the problem of needing water when taking tablets. The ad agency proposed starting the focus groups with the advertising prototypes created for the research, with no time spent discussing the participants’ category experiences and attitudes. The research team pushed back, believing that some initial discussion around category pain points could be enlightening. Fortunately, that’s what we did, because the big finding from that part of the discussion was that needing water never came up on its own. When I finally prompted for it most participants agreed it was a bit of an issue, but that was as far as they were willing to go. Ultimately, the client realized that their upcoming marketing program was oriented around a problem that barely existed, and they were able to revise their approach.

The point is that when and how discussion points arise can be some of the most valuable learning gained from qualitative. So it’s good practice to allow things to come up on their own whenever possible. This will allow you to observe when something arose, whether it did so with or without prompting, and, if unprompted, what led to the topic arising. What vocabulary did the participants use when bringing it up? If it had to be brought up by the moderator, do the participants have any thoughts as to why? Clearly identifying topics in the guide that will not be prompted will allow these conversations to happen, leading to key insights.

The guide must be created collaboratively. The purpose of market research is to mitigate business risk and to guide decisions. To do that effectively, all stakeholders must be involved in designing that research. This could include internal and external researchers, the brand team, R&D, various creative agencies and senior management. All stakeholders must fully buy into the research objectives and approach, meaning they must have input into the guide. The creation of a guide is often an iterative process in which the researcher gains understanding while clients are able to focus and refine their thinking. Sometimes clients go into research with a fairly good idea of what they want to do, but it’s not fully fleshed out. There’s nothing wrong with that, but the process of collaborating with the moderator to write the guide is the perfect opportunity to figure all that out. The irony here is that, if this process is fully collaborative, by the time the research arrives, everybody knows the guide so well that nobody, client or moderator, needs to look at it very much.

The guide must be adaptable. As researchers have been saying since the beginning of time, ‘it’s a guide, not a script.’ This means more than simply that the moderator isn’t going to read every question exactly as written, and in the order presented. While the guide must include all of the issues to be explored and provide a rough plan for how that will be accomplished, it must also allow for a good deal of flexibility. Topics will not necessarily come up in the expected order, some questions will fall flat or confuse the participants, some exercises will not be successful and unexpectedly interesting new topics might surface. Therefore, the guide should provide a variety of potential approaches for the discussion, not all of which might be used, and should allow the researcher to adjust depending on the flow of the discussion. It should also provide alternate orders for the various guide sections.

So, to sum up, if you want maximize the possibility of uncovering groundbreaking insights, make your guides organic, collaborative and flexible.

Note:  If you would like to read about even more basics on creating effective guides, a comprehensive list can be downloaded in the article contained at the link below.