Transcript BBFG Webinar

Applying Your Skills to
Online Qualitative
A First Look at
Bulletin Board
Focus Groups
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Special Olympic Session
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Purpose
• Help transition face-to-face moderators to
the BBFG environment
• Provide a forum for providing those
contemplating a BBFG project in the near
future with some hands-on advice
• Based in part on my recent experience in
coaching a moderator on her first BBFG
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What is a BBFG?
• A Bulletin Board Focus Group
• Using a bulletin board or forum software
for research purposes
• Bulletin Boards (“message boards”) were
one of the first online applications,
preceeding even the birth of the Internet
(think CompuServe or AOL)
• Bulletin Boards also used extensively for
support purposes
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How BBFGs Work…
• At its simplest…
– Moderator releases a
series of questions on Day
1
– Participants log in, during
the next 24 hours, read the
questions (and the answers
of others, possibly) &
answer them
– Moderator monitors and
reads new posts, probes as
required
– Process is repeated for the
duration of the bulletin
board
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A quick look at the interface…
• Let’s see the
interface…
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BBFGs are…
• Asynchronous: participants
log in at a time & place
convenient to them to answer
questions previously posted by
the moderator; moderator &
participants are typically NOT
logged on at the same time
• Text-mainly
• Unlimited length of post (nontwittered!)
• Time-limited (often 3-4 days)
• No need for participants to
have high bandwidth or speed,
more universal
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The Moderator’s 2 Main Tools…
• The questions and
their modalities
(“uninfluenced”,
“interview”,
“sequential”)
• The whiteboard and
its contents
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What about recruiting?
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It’s possible to recruit via traditional recruiters
Alternatively, there exist many trustworthy panels
Costs are similar to the real world
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Some implications of these
characteristics
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Since there is no real-time "companionship" or
immediate feedback, questions and the process
have to engage participants
There is limited opportunity to probe (since
participants usually sign in only once per day over
the course of 3-4 days)
It is sometimes difficult to promote interaction
between participants
BBFGs tend to generate a lot of textual material,
compared to chat or even face-to-face… think early
about how you will analyze this material (Excel is
your friend, as are tags & annotations)
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BBFGs are good for…
• Topics that benefit
from reflection
• Detailed explanations
and rationales
• Policy issues and
their implications
• “Big Picture” thinking
• “Homework” and
“assignments”
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BBFGs are also good for
participants…
• With little Internet
experience
• With low-speed
connections
• With only average
keyboarding skills
• Who are
geographically
dispersed across
many time zones
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BBFGs are ideal for…
• Channel research
(i.e., distributors,
retailers)
• Employee research
• Enterprise-wide
research
• World-wide research
• Cross-cultural
research
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Implications for Moderators
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Major Do's - 1
• BBFG = self-administered open-ended
questionnaire
– Questions must be clear, unambiguous, and
must not need a real-time interviewer to clarify
– Some opportunity for probing
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Major Do's - 2
• Aim to make BBFG a
Powerpoint slideshow
• Liberal use of clip art in
whiteboard to
– enliven
– illuminate
– help explain the questions
and topics.
• Powerpoint itself is the
simplest way to generate
whiteboard images (PNG
or GIF)
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Major Do's - 3
•
Encourage participants to feed off
each other, by
– constructing questions that do so
("Debate the future of hybrid
cars”)
– specifically instructing participants
that they can fulfill their obligations
by piggy-backing
– re-framing probes as questions to
everyone
– re-directing statements to the
group for comment (“John wrote
….; what do the rest of you feel
about this?”)
•
Use the uninfluenced mode or
subgroups judiciously as these
reduce participant interaction
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Major Don'ts
• Don't over-layer questions (“How would you describe an
‘Ideal’ relationship with a real estate broker? What would
constitute going “above and beyond the call of duty”?
What would added value be? What would create a “neat”
factor?”)
• Don't over-probe; a bulletin board allows for probing, but
two factors mitigate against its extensive use:
– Participants only see the probe when they log on next time, so
there is a loss of immediacy and interest
– Every probe interjects the moderator into the group, reducing
interaction
• Don’t over-indulge in questions on awareness or top-ofmind questions, or questions that only require yes/no
answers
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Minor issues (but still important)
• Greet everyone as they log into the bulletin
board: it is essential that the moderator devote
the first day of the board to ensuring that
everyone feels there is a presence “out there”
• "Probe" everyone at least once to help set
expectations & make participants feel valued
• Make the probes “learning lessons” in how you
want the participants to respond
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Generally…
• Invest in infrastructure. You need a decent
computer and high-speed Internet access
• Consider hooking up with a more experienced
online researcher who can, for love or money,
provide a safety net from beginning to end of
your first online qualitative project
• If the project and your client allow it, try to
include both an online and a real-world
component in your project. This will allow you to
validate the online experience and to contrast
the different lessons from each mode
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Budget adequately for…
• Direct costs (recruiting, incentives, and facilities), which in the
virtual world are roughly comparable to those in the real
• Your clerical time, which will include tasks like adding participants
to the facility roster, sending out invitations and reminders to them,
cutting and pasting the discussion guide into the facility, uploading
whiteboards, etc.
• Your moderating: you will be doing little else but monitoring the
bulletin board for its duration
• Your analysis: you will be both overjoyed and dismayed at the
depth and quantity of information that participants will share with you
using that methodology
• Remember: the savings to the client derive primarily from doing
fewer sessions in different cities, and from traveling virtually.
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Just Do It
• The least of your concerns is the actual
moderating… you will find that your realworld moderating skills translate
amazingly well to the online world,
whether real-time or asynchronous
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Recommended Reading:
• Qualitative Research Online, by Miller &
Walkowski
• Other Source: my blog,
http://pbelisle.blogspot.com/
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Questions?
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Thank You!
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