Welcome back, in this lesson,
we will explore an essential skill set necessary for qualitative research.
That is how to write questions by topic and
sequence, I will show you how to do this.
After this lesson you will be able to write questions by topics,
put questions in sequence from general to more specific, and
apply the skill to our business case scenario.
Come on, lets get started, first, let's think about
the topics you want to cover during your interview or focus group.
You might want to jot down every topic possible you want to cover,
this could be the beginning of what you will use as a coding guide.
A coding guide is a template that contains all the topics that you want to
cover in the focus group, it is used to help identify themes.
Next, you would look at each topic and
decide all the sub-categories that one might want to cover within the topic.
And lastly, look at each of the topics and
think about how you would best organize them to move smoothly through them.
For example, simply consider how you organize a conversation with a friend,
you don't usually say, how much did you pay for that dress?
You usually say, hey, I've never seen that dress before, is it new?
And then you might say, where did you get it?
When did you get it?
And then, about how much was it?
In other words, you want to provide a context for
the discussion you will be having first, and then get into further details.
It is a good practice to think about the flow of the questionnaire as if you know
absolutely nothing about the topic and you want to get a clear picture.
Think about learning to surf,
you will want to try to balance on the surfboard while it's on the land first.
You will need to know how to get on the surfboard and how to place your feet.
In the focus group or
interview, you need to start from the beginning in order to get a clear picture.
Here is an example of a time when I had to group topics in a specific order for
individual interviews.
I knew absolutely nothing about legal practices of Chief General and Council.
I knew I had to ask them about their current practices,
how they decided on lawyers to hire, what kind of system they had.
Whether there was a computer system or phone system,
what kind of subscriptions they had to law services and magazines, and so on.
I needed to know many subtopics with in each topic, then
I needed to put all those topics in order, so that it was fluid like a conversation.
So let's think about the course business project related to the new cell phone.
What topics might we want to address?
We would address respondent's current use of the cellphone, and
we might ask how often they bought a cellphone and what type of plan they use.
We would probably ask the reason for their current cellphone use.
Do they need it for school, work, family, friends, or all of those purposes?
We would ask about the attributes of cell phone they need.
What do they use it for most, photos, calculator,
translator, emails, texting, and so on?
We would ask what attributes they want in a cell phone.
Do they want more storage, a better camera, longer battery, what do they want?
Then we would ask about what they think is acceptable for cost of a cell phone.
We would ask questions about the style of the cell phone they desire.
If we were having conversation with the stranger and you knew
nothing about the latest cell phone what is the best order to address these topics?
Move them around like puzzle pieces until the order flows nicely.
Add any topics you may have forgotten or that came from your background research.
This concludes our lesson on assessing questions by topic, and
putting them in reverse pyramid order.
After this lesson, you should now be able to assess questions by topic.
Put questions in sequence in reverse pyramid order from general to more
specific, and apply this skill to our course business scenario.