An expanded view on relevance
In our last post, we outlined Talk Shoppe’s best practices for empathetic research during this extraordinary time. Today, we shift to expanding our understanding of what’s relevant to respondents and our work.
While we always frame our research within the big picture, COVID-19 has given us an opportunity to reexamine what the “big picture” means in light of the current climate and what we should consider relevant context. The things that may have been most important pre-COVID for understanding people have expanded, so now it’s about finding those new factors.
EXPANDED RELEVANCE
Aiming to better understand this “bigger big picture,” we have been getting creative with study set-up and fielding to help us unpack unexpected findings and trends.
Using current events as primary data cuts: changes in the national conversation and to policies that impact daily life can be extreme from one day to the next, so the potential for news to impact respondents' opinions and behaviors is greater than ever. We’ve found that cutting data by the date of completion and mapping trends back to current events is an important check.
Intentional sampling timing: to allow us to isolate the impact of significant events during analysis, we have been strategizing how to best utilize field time. One tactic that has proved beneficial has been proactively extending field times and ensuring readable, balanced completes per day.
Redefining regional impact: every state is experiencing the impact of COVID-19 in different ways at different times, so we have been taking extra steps to ensure we look at studies through a more granular localized context, rather than by broader regional zones. For qualitative research, we have been expanding our local research ahead of interviews to give us a clear picture of what our respondents might be facing. For quantitative research, we use zip-code collections to give us the ability to analyze data not just by region, but by city and state and augmenting for specific areas, as needed.
Digging into at-home demographics: demographic questions usually vary between studies, but in this time, we have been including and analyzing data by expanded demos, including things like current financial situation & outlook, the health of family members & friends, emotional well-being, household size (both number of people and physical space), employment situation & outlook, and more.
In our next post, we will wrap up the discussion with our thoughts on the importance of research agility in the time of COVID.