Our SSRS Qualitative Team, represented by Darby Steiger and Melissa Silesky, attended the QRCA annual conference in San Antonio on February 2-5 with about 250 other qualitative researchers from around the world. The conference was a powerful experience of networking, learning, and celebrating with qualitative leaders, thinkers, innovators, and practitioners.

Darby had the honor of being a first-time presenter at the conference, teaching a workshop called “Cognitive Interviewing 101: Adding a Crucial Blade to Your Qualitative Swiss Army Knife.” Along with her co-presenter, Andrew Stavisky of the U.S. Government Accountability Office, she led an interactive session to teach participants about the rationale and methodology of cognitive pretesting, which participants seemed really excited to learn.

Aside from Darby’s session – because QRCA is mostly attended by researchers and recruiters working in the market research industry – many of the workshops, roundtables and side conversations focus on consumer behavior, packaged goods, product testing, and usability testing. While this is quite different from the work our qualitative team does at SSRS, we particularly like QRCA because it gives us a peek into the latest innovations and developments in market research.

Here are some nuggets of what we learned:

• AI is opening up many exciting innovations for qualitative researchers, but we shouldn’t jump in too quickly. Several presenters warned that it’s just not able to effectively replicate human behavior, empathy, and understanding. In an experiment around using AIMI (AI Moderated Interviewing) to test a health campaign about menopause, the researchers found that the AI chatbot did a poor job of incorporating previous answers into its probes and that participants found the probes to feel sterile and transactional.
• Qualitative research can produce more insightful findings by incorporating creative projective techniques. In a few engaging workshops, we learned about activities like guided visualization, timeline regression, “Blob Trees,” and Mad Libs that can help elicit more meaningful input from our participants.
• In a small group roundtable with qualitative recruiters, they suggested that researchers should go on a “first date” with their recruiter to better understand their capabilities, their procedures and how we can better collaborate, especially when things don’t go as planned. They encouraged us to ask many questions and to make sure we tell them exactly what we want!
• Across multiple sessions and roundtables, attendees discussed ways to set focus group participants up to be as open, thoughtful, and engaged as possible. Techniques included sending pre-recorded videos about logistics & expectations in advance, building in time for reflection and processing during groups, and incorporating activities that engage participants who process information visually, through writing, or even through movement.
• The conference reinforced that best practices and innovative approaches to qualitative research often emerge from seemingly unrelated fields. Sessions drew lessons from personal development, hypnosis, yoga, behavioral economics, and even psychics. This was a reminder that any field that centers deep reflection and participant engagement can offer ideas that can be thoughtfully adapted for social science research.

Darby and Melissa left San Antonio realizing that we have more similarities than we do differences with market researchers. We’re buzzing with excitement to share our learnings with our colleagues and our clients, and to start infusing new ideas into our upcoming research! We are so grateful for the QRCA community!