Population

As simplistic as it is, market research is often defined as either “qualitative” or “quantitative.” In conversational use, most researchers use and define these categories fairly similarly. But this is changing. While “qualitative” use and meaning is fairly consistent, we are seeing a notable fragmentation in what the phrase “quantitative research” means to market research practitioners and related professionals.

My hypothesis is that over the next year we will see strong demand for qualitative research, but it will skew to what we might call hard-core qual. That is, projects that are using qualitative research with rigorous attention to methodological and analytical execution. Thus, researchers will be expected to deliver projects that meets the persistent needs for scale and speed while also being rigorous. Organizations that embrace customer-centric, data driven decision making (which is most of them) often do value qual. But as these organization have become more data-centric, their business decision makers have become more aware of data reliability concerns. Thus, it’s not surprising that while we are seeing strong demand for qual, we are also seeing higher expectations about the methodological rigor with which it conducted.