Research Approaches and Methods

Although I have used quantitative techniques such as surveys and experiments over the course of my marketing career (and still do), I currently specialize in the application of several approaches to qualitative research that deliver answers to questions such as: How do...?, How does...?, How to...?, Who is...?, and What does...?

My work is influenced by two approaches to inquiry in particular: ethnomethodology, and multimodal qualitative research. In short, I study the 'methods' people use to construct and produce their social worlds so we can better understand how things are accomplished socially and thereby 'how things work' in different settings.

Many problems cannot be reduced to measurable variables. Most social phenomena are highly complex. Processes emerge out of specific contexts and are not easily generalizable except in simplistic and potentially misleading ways. This is particularly true of problems that need to be solved in companies and other organizations which are usually unique to those particular organizations and the communities they serve. This is the realm of the day-to-day workings that organizations must understand to be effective in their specific operational contexts.

Some of the specific methods I use include:

* Multimodal discourse analysis which explores the ways people use symbolic resources (and the words, images, colours and sounds of which they may be comprised) to make meaning in social contexts.

* Social practice analysis to explore the resources, artefacts and activities people use to build their worlds along with the norms and eligibility conditions which structure those worlds and afford or constraint certain kinds of action.

*Phenomenographic analysis is a methodology that analyzes the variations in how people within a group understand the same phenomenon. Phenomenography involves systematic close analysis of depth interview data and is a powerful approach for revealing where difficulties arise so they can be effectively addressed.

The data I study tends to be gathered through such techniques as participant observation, shadowing, online focus groups, semi-structured and structured interviews, open-ended surveys and the collection of online and offline content including video, audio and still images.

Altogether the above approaches find application in marketing and new product/service development, human-computer interaction, organizational design, social policy design and anywhere one needs to understand how the people who experience specific phenomena understand, respond to, and co-create them.

Such ways of working are even more powerful when combined with strategies such as quantitative content analysis which I have added to my toolkit. Although based on very different theories about language than the other methods I use, quantitative content analysis makes it possible to efficiently study large text-based datasets linked to 'corpora' or dictionaries of words and concepts to enable the study of sentiment analysis and the networks of relationships between various ideas, people and sources connected to material such as social media discussions and other online forums.