One of our client’s recently asked us to help with a research project to learn more about staff perceptions. Our ultimate goal was to discover staff attitudes and beliefs articulated in their own words.
To gather this qualitative information, we decided to do one-on-one interviews, as opposed to a focus group, because we were interested in individuals’ perspectives without the influence of their peers and we didn’t want group interaction to be part of the method.
We also recognized that surveys or questionnaires are most effective when looking at how many people hold a certain opinion, whereas interviews are better for understanding what the opinion is and why a person might subscribe to it. By talking with individuals and taking an interrogatory approach, we could more fully explore answers that might otherwise be underdeveloped if answered in another manner such as a survey.
Finally, as part of this project we will need to synthesize and share our findings with the team and potentially the entire company. Reporting often is the last step in the research process and it is important to think through the best way to present your findings and results.
As we completed this research project, I thought it would be helpful to document some of our learnings around best practices.
- Record and transcribe the sessions. Whenever possible, it is a good idea to record and transcribe the sessions. Clearly, transcription can be time consuming and expensive. If it is not possible, then it is vital that researchers take careful notes. As a best practice, consider having two researchers do the interviews: One person can ask the questions and guide the discussion, and the other person can capture the responses.
- Focus on thematic analysis. As you write your report summarizing responses, you will want to review your notes or your transcripts and look for common themes in relation to your subjects. For instance, are there particular responses that were consistent among baby boomers that are different than the responses of Generation-Y subjects? Consider coding responses so you can easily find them and assign percentages in reports.
- Consider developing a hierarchical outline or matrix. Once you’ve read over the written transcript and identified themes or sub-themes, you may want to organize them in a hierarchical outline or create a matrix to track responses.
- Pay particular attention to minority opinions. If there are one or two people who differ radically from the other responses, you may want to make note of those in your report and findings as well.
- Consider presenting quotes from participants. You may want to include a few quotes to illustrate individual’s perspective but be sure to provide the appropriate context for them so they’re fully understood.
- Write your report. Consider your audiences and determine sections you’ll want to include in your report. These may include:
- An abstract or executive summary
-
- An introduction or summary of project background
- Methods: where you describe the participants, what was measured, how you collected data and how the data was analyzed
- Results: This is where you report the results and include quotes, graphs, figures and tables to illustrate key finding
- Conclusions: This is the section where you outline the implications of the findings. You may want to articulate your ideas for how to use the information, you may want to highlight benefits or limitations of the findings, or you may want to recommend additional studies be conducted.
If you have other real-world examples of best practices that you’ve used as you researched, analyzed and reported on work situations or to explore other issues, please share them.