5 Ways Good Facilitation Makes or Breaks Qualitative Research
When it comes to market research, confidence is everything. Clients can’t trust the results unless they trust the process. In qualitative research, few aspects are more important than an effective discussion moderator or facilitator.
Facilitators have a lot of influence in focus groups or in-depth one-on-one interviews. They guide the discussion, frame the questions, and they react and respond to participant opinions. How that role is performed can have a dramatic impact on the feedback that is generated. Quite simply, the quality of the insights gathered is often a direct result of the quality of the moderation.
So, what makes for high-quality facilitation in a research setting? Let’s look at 5 ways that a good facilitator can ensure a high-value result.
1. A good facilitator ensures objectivity you can trust
It is critically important to have a facilitator who is completely removed from any implications of the research findings. Impartiality is a fundamental requirement of any research moderator. That means they shouldn’t be an employee of the client organization, nor should they work for a partner vender, such as an ad agency or ongoing consulting company.
Personal biases can play a significant role in moderator-audience interactions, even if the facilitator doesn’t realize it.Topics that are more relevant or familiar to the facilitator will consume excess attention. Their objectivity can be impacted by their own market hypothesis or personal experiences with the brands or organizations being discussed.
Market research bias can be subconscious
Moderator biases can be very subtle or even subconscious. To illustrate, let’s assume you are in the market to purchase a new vehicle, a Jeep Wrangler. While driving the streets, you’ll suddenly be acutely aware of each Jeep Wrangler you see. You are not consciously searching for them, but subconsciously you are, simply because that vehicle is highly relevant to you at the moment. This can easily happen during a focus group or one on one discussion. A moderator who has any preconceived notions around the topic at hand may be compromised. It’s not a question of ethics, but of human nature.
Takeaway: Having an impartial facilitator will ensure that your findings reflect your target market, not your moderator.
2. Good facilitators warm up the crowd and get better feedback
Every athlete will tell you that a proper warm-up is critical for delivering a solid performance come game time. The same thing can be said of a research discussion. The first 10 minutes are often the most important moments of the entire session. Why? Because that is the facilitator’s opportunity to make participants as comfortable as possible for the upcoming session. Uncomfortable participants are ineffective participants. They hold back, limit responses, and are far less likely to offer emotional feedback. You risk losing the real qualitative research ‘gold’.
A good market research or focus group facilitator is very deliberate about how they spend those opening 10 minutes. They’ll want to get everybody up to speed by reiterating relevant information about the session. This could include purpose, duration, process, how participants were selected, and, of course, a suitable introduction of the facilitator and their role in the discussion.
Focus group participants relax by talking about themselves
You’ll also want to use this time to set the tone of the upcoming discussions:
It’s important to quickly build participants’ confidence. To accomplish this, I start with some introductory questions that are focused on the participants themselves. This could include their jobs, families, communities, and personal experiences, as opposed to questions about the category or marketplace. By discussing these familiar topics, participants will relax and get comfortable with the overall format of the session. This sets the table for better feedback throughout the session.
Takeaway: By allowing the participants to relax during the first few moments of a focus group, a good facilitator will ensure more valuable feedback throughout.
3. Allowing participants to formulate their thoughts prior to discussion yields clear, reliable feedback
It goes without saying that the purpose of qualitative sessions is to gather high-value opinions. The approach to facilitation can often help, or hinder, a participant’s ability to formulate and articulate their thoughts effectively. One common mistake is to not provide people enough time to formulate their opinions.
In my experience, it just isn’t effective to hit participants with a ‘rapid fire’ series of questions. When people are rushed, they simply respond with generic or obvious responses that often lack depth or insight. What we want are well thought out responses.
To achieve this, I recommend translating research questions into written ‘exercises’ for participants to complete before any conversation. This provides participants with an opportunity to think and reflect. They’ll have time to organize their thoughts and provide supporting rationale for their opinions and responses. This feedback will lead to stronger finding sand will inform better strategic decisions, which, of course, is the entire point!
Focus group exercises avoid group think
In addition to greater research depth, this approach also avoids a Group Think scenario. Participants are committing to their point of view before they hear other people’s opinions on the topic. This increases our confidence in the feedback. Researchers can be 100% sure that written responses were created independently of influence from others.
Takeaway: By providing time to formulate responses, a good facilitator will get well-considered, individual responses that offer true insight.
4. Avoiding opinion confirmation means not tipping the market research scales
Being an objective facilitator goes beyond ensuring you do not have a vested interest in the results. It is also important to ensure you are not impacting participants by subtly providing feedback on their responses during live discussions.
This can happen very easily through non-verbal communication cues. Enthusiastically nodding your head up and down tells a participant that you ‘like’ what they are saying. You are reinforcing a particular train of thought. Conversely, narrowing your eyes or pursing your lips can signal to a participant that you are skeptical of what they are saying.
The key is to present a neutral facial expression during discussions and to limit any physical responses to answers.It is also important to avoid any kind of obvious verbal evaluation of their feedback. Responding with things like ‘great point’, or ‘fantastic’ will be noted by all participants in the session and could impact their upcoming answers.
Finally, at no point should a facilitator ever challenge a participant’s opinion. The quickest way to kill the value of a focus group is to make participants feel self-conscious about their feedback.
Takeaway: The facilitator who plays it down the middle is the one who gets the real scoop.
5. Strong facilitators manage diverse personalities and ensure each opinion counts
The world is full of unique personalities and focus groups are no different. Some focus group participants might be described as ‘loud’. These people may attempt to dominate the meeting and impress their opinions on their fellow participants. Others are very soft-spoken and might prefer to limit their participation as much as possible.
The facilitator’s job is to ensure everyone’s opinions are heard and represented – regardless of their communication style. Some strategies I use to manage diverse groups include:
- Maintaining firm control of who speaks and when. It is important to avoid letting participants dictate who gets to speak on a topic, the order of responses, or how long they get to speak.
- Ensuring that everyone gets a turn to speak on each topic.
- Ensuring that speaking time is as balanced as possible.
- As mentioned previously, having participants complete exercises before speaking out loud will allow people who are less confident speaking in groups to prepare in advance.
Takeaway: By managing the focus group effectively, a good market research facilitator gets everyone’s opinions, not just the most outspoken ones.
Leveraging qualitative research in your organization
Research data and reporting can be the backbone of many significant organizational decisions. Following these facilitation principals will help to ensure the information gathered is both credible and reliable so that the decisions that follow can be made with confidence.
How can good qualitative research help ensure success for your organization? How can you turn market insights into confident decisions?
Let’s chat! I’ll gain a deeper understanding of your organization, while also answering your questions aboutStreet Smart’s process.