QRCA Views Winter 2005 : Page 25
Rethinking Blogs as a Qualitative Research Tool BY STEVE AUGUST KDA Research • San Francisco, CA • steve@kdaresearch.com W Blogs offer researchers a compelling new research tool, allowing researchers to establish a rich immediacy with participants — and then sustain that immediacy over days, weeks or months. eb logs, or blogs, have received a great deal of attention over the past two years. These web diaries are easy to create and update, and their use by consumers, professionals and even corporations has exploded. In the context of market research, the emphasis has focused on using technology to mine information from publicly available blogs in order to identify word of mouth or “buzz” on a particular category or offering. However, blogs accessible only by participants and researchers that are set up specifically for a research study can offer researchers an intriguing new tool for gathering rich, in-depth qualitative data. This article will explore how the unique capabilities of blogs can be harnessed for the purposes of in-depth qualitative market research. Blogs and the Phenomenon of Blogging Web logs, more popularly known as blogs, are essentially online diaries with dated entries, displayed in reverse chronological order on a simple website. These diary entries can contain text, images, sounds and even video. The first blogs were created in the mid-1990s as ongoing journals of early web adopters, pointing others to links to sites of interest to the author, or blogger. While early blogs were manually updated, the technology was later refined to automate the process of posting new blog entries, categorizing and archiving entries, creating blogs and updating interested readers when new entries were posted. In 1999, several companies created hosting tools for would-be bloggers and continued to refine the process of blogging over the years until even non-technical people could easily create and update QUALITATIVE RESEARCH CONSULTANTS ASSOCIATION 25
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