Qualitative research methods and applications

¶ … social sciences. In general, qualitative research looks to gain an in-depth understanding of both human behavior and the reasons for human behavior. In other words, qualitative research focuses on the why and the how of decision making.

One pattern of human behavior is the effect advertising has on an individual's patterns of consumption. This paper focuses on how a qualitative research study could be conducted on the question of the effect of advertising on individual consumer patters and habits.

The amount of money spent on advertising consumer products is rising every year. (Graydon, 2003 p. 156). At its most fundamental definition, advertising is paid and/or sometimes free communication through a medium in which the sponsor is identified and the message is controlled. The methods used for advertisements are diverse, including publicity, public relations, product placements, sponsorships, underwriting and sales promotion. Further, every medium imaginable is used to send the advertiser's message to the consumer, including television, radio, movies, magazines, newspapers, Internet and billboards. (Young, 2005 p. 76). Everywhere one looks there is advertisements.

With all this money spent on making advertisement a prevalent part of society, the question becomes what is the impact of advertisement, especially as to the its effect on consumer purchase motive? The impact of advertising has been a widely debated matter with many different claims being made on multiple sides. Proponents of advertisement typically argue that advertisements inform consumers about important aspects of a product and let them make intelligent decisions in their purchasing behavior. (Wernick, 1991, p. 242). Critics, on the other hand, will typically argue advertisement provides a biased view of a product and actually harms the consumer by increasing the costs of the product to account for the large amounts of money used in advertising it. (Rapailee, 2006, p. 68).

Abstract of Study

The purpose of this market research study is to discover how advertising affects or impacts, if at all, the behavior of consumer purchase motive and the reasons for or lack of impact. To make this determination, the study will use a focus group. The focus group will be comprised of sub-groups made up of various age groups, namely ages fourteen to eighteen, nineteen to twenty-nine, thirty to forty, forty to fifty, fifty to sixty and above. Each age group will consist of ten individuals, half male and half female. Each individual will be randomly selected through an email inquiry. The emails will be gathered using various consumer and organizational lists. The emails will be sent to random individuals and the first ten to respond will become part of the focus group.

The purpose of using the various age groups is because advertising, or certain forms of advertising, may have a different effect on the purchase motive of the different age groups. Further, these different age groups may have different purchase motives. More so, both males and females will be used in order to determine any variances on effect of purchase motive between the genders.

Once the focus group is selected, each individual will be required to maintain a journal, recording all of the products they purchase on a given day. The following week they will be required to maintain a journal recording the advertisements that effect them on a given day. After both journals are complete, each participant will be required to respond to a questionnaire focusing on the reasoning behind their purchases.

With these two journals, comparisons can be made to see if the advertisements that they were subjected to correlated with their purchases. The reason for having the purchase journal preceded the advertisement journal is to ensure that the participants do not consciously make or not make certain purchases in order to correlate or not correlate with the advertisements they were subjected to. The results of the journal and survey potion of the research will be substantiated with a controlled experiment, as explained below.

Hypothesis

It is predicted that the consumer study groups' individual purchasing motive will correlate with the advertisements they are subjected to, thus demonstrating that advertisement has a persuasive effect or impact on the behavior of consumer purchase motives.

Research Methodology

There are two forms of research available in studying Consumer Purchase Motive. Secondary research involves using the research that has already done by someone else. An example of this is using information and statistics compiled by the government in terms of various populations. (Girden, 2001, p. 202).

Because there is no perfect research method in that each has its own strengths and weaknesses, employing several different approaches is beneficial. One method is the survey, which is useful for getting a large amount of very specific information. Surveys ask questions, typically open-ended or close-ended. Open-ended questions have the advantage that the person answering the question is not limited to the provided answers and therefore are not influenced by seeing a list of provided answers. However, often times open-ended questions are skipped and not answered as they take more time and can be challenging. In order to provide a meaningful response, sample sizes of at least one-hundred individuals are essential. (Girden, 2001, p. 48).

In order to gather a representative sampling of the Brisbane Metropolitan consumer population, this study will recruit participants through the use of a mass email. The email will be sent at large to a broad sampling. The initial email will request individuals to participate in the study and request that if they are interested, to answer a few questions that will focus on what age and gender demographic they are in.

Surveys can be done in several different forms. For example, sending surveys through the mail is inexpensive but usually have a low return rate (5 to 20%). Phone surveys tend to get a somewhat higher response, but fewer questions can be asked due to the difficulty of having to read answer options and that the typical person is not willing to stay on the phone for longer than five minutes. Face-to-face surveys also work, but many people are reluctant to discuss sensitive information with an unknown individual. (Girden, 2001, p. 145).

This study will use surveys as one way to gather data. The journals will essentially serve as open-ended questions whereas the follow-up questionnaire will contain both open and close-ended questions. In order to get the sample group, initial surveys will be sent via email asking for basic information and confirming the participants' inclination to participate.

In drafting the survey to be used, great care has to be taken in order to mineralize the potential for bias. Surveys, as with any kind of research, is particularly vulnerable to bias. For example, the wording of a question can significantly influence the answer, and therefore the study's outcome, greatly. (Girden, 2001, p. 96).

To detail the role of the journals, these will essentially be open-ended questions. The participants will be given a journal and asked to keep a running log of all their purchases for a week. This will entail of nothing more detailed then simply listing the date of the purchase, what was purchased and where it was purchased at. The following week's journal requirement will be similar in that it will ask the respondent to simply list each advertisement that they recall seeing or hearing, what the advertisement was for, where they heard it and when they heard it.

As previously stated, the survey will arrive after the completion of the journal entries. Its purpose is to delve into the reasoning of the journal entry results. Some sample questions will include along the lines of:

Do you find advertisements informational?

Do you rely on advertisements to provide you with information needed when considering a purchase?

Do you enjoy advertisements?

Do you typically buy the same brand of a product?

If you change brands, what causes you to change?

Another important form of research is the conducting of experiments. Experiments are particularly helpful when a researcher wants to rule out all but one explanation for a specific observation. For example, if an observer notices an increase in sales of a particular item after the commencement of a particular advertisement campaign, that observer may want to know whether the increase in sales was because of the advertisement or because of other factors (such as shelf-space, unrelated demand, etc.). An experiment allows the observer to control all the variables and thus could involve inviting people to shop in a simulated store. Half of the respondents are shown the advertisements, the other half is not. Thus, the observer will be able to know whether the advertisement is the cause of the increase in sales, therefore knowing that the advertisement has a positive effect on consumer purchase motive. Naturally, the major draw back to using an experiment is that the consumer is removed from their natural surroundings. (Girden, 2001, 167).

In this study, an experiment will be used after the survey as a method of further verifying the survey results. The participants of the experiment portion of the study will be different from the journal participants as the purpose of the experiment cannot be known prior to the experiment. These individuals will be recruited via email, similar to that of the journal recruitment email. However, the email will only detail that they have been selected to participate in a free shopping spree at a given time and place in appreciation for their loyal patronage. Another possibility is to set up a drawing at the selected store. From the individuals who register, random participants can be selected.

The experiment itself will utilize a simulated shopping environment will be set up. Half the participants will be bombarded with advertisements while shopping and prior to shopping (such as having ads mailed and emailed to them). The other half will not be bombarded with the advertisements for that particular brand and products. All other variables will be the same. After the experiment, the observer will be able to compare the purchases of the two groups to see if the advertisement group purchased the advertised brand and product more than the non-advertisement group.

Another potentially beneficial method to be used is the focus group. The focus group is essentially the foundation of the journal portion of the research. A focus group typically involves gathering together a group of six to twelve consumers to discuss the role of advertisements. Focus groups are most useful in situations where one does not have specific questions to ask, therefore making it an excellent starting point for the Brisbane Metropolitan Consumer Research study. (Girden, 2001, p. 186). Further, by starting with a focus group, the survey questions will be less likely biased as they will be based on the unbiased information gathered from the initial focus group. Therefore, in the Brisbane project, the various consumer focus groups will be given journals to keep track of all of the purchases for one week and all of the advertisements they see the following week. The data will then be gathered to see what, if any, correlation there is between the consumer's purchases and the advertisements that they were aware of. From this general, focus group based information, the survey questions will be able to be drawn up in order to delve deeper into the reasons for the correlations or lack thereof.

It may be helpful to immediately follow up the focus group study, prior to the survey questions, with a personal interview. This will allow the observer to fill in some blanks by asking in-depth questions that will be helpful in formulating proper survey questions. Because personal interviews are extremely vulnerable to interviewer bias, this portion of the research should be given little credibility and serve merely as a way to formulate the survey and to gain feedback on how the focus group research portion worked and where it may have been improved.