Qualitative Market Research: A Comprehensive Guide [Paperback]

Hy Mariampolski is an inspiring man - and both generous and energetic in spreading the word about qualitative techniques and ethnography. It is refreshing to read such a well-written guide without having all the self-promotional baggage that litters too many practitioners handbooks.

For a start, I find his history of qualitative techniques a great place to start this volume. As a synopsis of our professional history this is colourful, accurate and useful in contextualising why researchers do what they do.

He then rolls through the big questions - when to use qualitative research, which techniques to choose, the planning of projects (including a thorough section of choosing & screening respondents) and then the juicy section: running interviews or focus groups.

Here, Mariampolski makes us feel right at home. He's instructive without being didactic, and he speaks in a common-sense manner, peppering his advice with pertinent examples and a few illustrations. He includes a very useful chapter on the special considerations of youth research, multicultural research, interviewing business executives and covering particularly sensistive topics.

The final main section is on the analysis of qualitative information, and the presentation of this. Again, Mariampolski speaks directly and usefully.

Overall I'd say the book is pitched mostly at newer researchers, and at those who are contemplating a typically fascinating career in qualitative research, but this shouldn't stop a more senior researcher from going through the easily read 300 pages and making notes: even to check their own techniques and consider new ideas.

The book is current (2001) and would make an excellent basis for a set of in-house training workshops for the research team. It is well worth the purchase. I wish all research texts were this clear.

The break-through Japanese management researcher Ishikawa,What Is Total Quality Control?: The Japanese Way (Business Management) whose work was popular in the West in the 1960's as the 'Fish Bone' Diagramme, had a rule. Before you asked 'how'(you were to do anything) first you exhausted the 'why' (it should be done at all or on a particular project or at a particular time).

We have to disclose up-front that One Big Idea Consulting Limited NZ has been training and educating managements around the globe at board level in the Ishikawa philosophy for two decades... as it applies to marketing research, creative branding and intergrated R&D. We are biased. No doubt about that.Guide to Quality Control Ishikawa has legs into the 21st century !

This Ishikawa focus, highlights the flaw of this otherwise quite decent novice guide to marketing research in its so called 'qualitative' guise. Too much 'how' and not nearly enough 'why'.

Wendy Gordon's Good Thinking: A Guide to Qualitative Research is much more to the point... and much more in line with Ishikawa skepticism. For skeptical researchers with a few hundred projects behind their focus groups, observation windows and discussion panels and open-ended questionnaires, Gordon stands out as a veteran consumer researcher who tackles the really tough 'WHY' issues beyond the run-of-the-mill 'HOW'. Other than that, we have no quarrel with the Miriampolski content such as it is. For the beginners it is an OK starter, before you graduate to Gordon and tough-test your thinking.

The key question is not so much as 'HOW' to apply one other research technique in the tool-box. The really critical issue is 'WHY' should one or other research project be done at all ! Gordon digs much deeper than Miriampolski in trying to answer the 'WHY'.