Guest editorial

Citation

Boddy Robin Croft, C. (2010), "Guest editorial", Qualitative Market Research, Vol. 13 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/qmr.2010.21613daa.001

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, Volume 13, Issue 4

About the Guest Editors

Clive Boddy Currently an Honorary Visiting Professor in marketing at Middlesex University Business School and a Visiting Professor in Marketing Research at Lincoln University, UK. He is a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and a Chartered Marketer. He is also a fellow of the Australian Institute of Management and a fellow of the Association of Tertiary Education Management. Currently an academic, he has given numerous research conference papers in the UK, Australia, Ireland, Hong Kong and South Korea.

Robin CroftPrincipal Lecturer in Marketing and Strategy at the Business School of the University of Glamorgan. He is a regular and award winning speaker at the Academy of Marketing Conferences in the UK.

The purpose of this Special Issue of Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal was to offer a forum for the discussion of the ways in which projective techniques provide an aid to understanding marketing problems, insightful material above and beyond what other market research techniques can offer, and can enrich and deepen our understanding of the lives of people as consumers.

Stated aims of this special issue were to provide a critical evaluation of the evolution of projective techniques in market research, the use of academic and practitioner research in developing projective techniques and to address reliability and validity issues in using projective techniques. These issues are addressed by the first paper in the journal. This first paper is Lawrence Soley’s strong and comprehensive paper on “Projective techniques in US marketing and management research: the influence of The Achievement Motive.” Lawrence Soley largely answers the questions posed about the reliability and validity of projective techniques in previous papers (Boddy, 2008) and again in the Bond and Ramsey paper in this edition of this journal. Lawrence Soley convincingly demonstrates how criticisms of projective techniques have been misplaced. Further, he discusses just how much evidence there is of the reliability and validity of projective techniques in use and concludes from this that they are both reliable and have predictive validity.

Lawrence Soley laments the lack of use of these techniques by US academics and states that this is largely because there are very few paradigm champions for the techniques in US universities. He conceptualises projective techniques as originating from the paradigm of psychoanalysis and says that because this paradigm failed to attract many adherents outside psychology, projective techniques never became widely used in academic business research. Further, that when projective techniques were used they were misunderstood by critics. As a result of this, says Lawrence Soley, projective techniques are now the least commonly taught of all qualitative techniques in US universities.

We do not definitively know the situation in Australian and UK universities but expect that a similar situation prevails, despite the common use of these techniques by UK and Australian research practitioners. Clearly, projective techniques have been severely neglected by academics and the awareness and knowledge of projective techniques is fading in the academic community. Lawrence Soley concludes that projective techniques should be more used by academics and practitioners because of the insights they offer. We certainly concur with this viewpoint and the other papers in this special issue help to establish why this is the case.

The second substantive paper in this special issue is the paper from Anu Helkkula and Minna Pihlström, on the use of the event-based narrative inquiry technique. This presents a hybrid projective technique which practitioners may find useful. The technique combines event-based inquiry with the use of narratives and metaphors, to explore consumer perceptions. The technique was successfully used to research ideas for new services and it is in this regard that practitioners may find it to be a useful technique.

Michael S. Mulvey and Beena E. Kavalam present the third paper which is one that uses projective techniques in the form of metaphorical explorations, to expand on and gain insights into the reasons why female students in the USA choose one university college over other choices available to them. These insights were used to develop and revise marketing strategies for the college aimed at increasing enrolments.

Joeng Koenigstorfer and Andrea Groeppel-Klein’s paper, the fourth paper presented here, is on using photographs as projective stimuli to research food-choice decisions regarding healthy foods and is an interesting presentation on photo-elicitation and on influences on healthy food choice. Practitioners and academics alike may find useful insights into possibilities for conducting product usage research in this paper. Derek Ramsey and Elaine Bond in the fifth paper, then discuss how information and communication technologies could theoretically be useful in the design, delivery and analysis of projective techniques in research.

An interesting paper from Germany is Philipp Broeckelmann’s analysis of people’s reactions towards advertising on mobile telephones. Over four studies using a cartoon as a projective stimulus he finds, for example, that the reactions of consumers are the most positive towards advertising on mobile telephones when the advertising is relevant to the shopping situation that they are in at the time. Thus, reactions to coffee shop advertising are most acceptable when consumers are actually in a coffee shop, particularly if the advertising contains a money-off offer to buy coffee.

The sixth paper is on the role of information and communication technologies in using projective techniques as survey tools to meet the challenges of bounded rationality, by Elaine Bond and Derek Ramsey. This paper explores the design and delivery of projective techniques in research studies via information technology. It concludes that information technology can play a useful part in designing valid and reliable instruments and in helping in the analysis of results from using these projective instruments.

The seventh and last paper in the special edition, by Lorraine Davidson and Heather Skinner, a practitioner and academic researcher, respectively, compares the analysis of projective and other qualitative data both with and without using computer-aided analysis software. This is an interesting area and one where practitioners typically conclude that no computer software can replace the sheer power of the human brain in analysing qualitative data. Academics on the other hand usually seem to present the use of Computer-Aided Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS) as a sop to their positivist colleagues, implying that such use gives the findings some kind of positivist scientific credibility. Academics therefore often conclude that the use of such software is advantageous to the researcher. Lorraine Davidson and Heather Skinner conclude that using CAQDAS to analyse projective data leads the researcher to loose sight of the big picture in the research. Also, that visual and some tone of voice data do not easily lend themselves to such computer-aided analysis. As projective techniques can involve using cartoons, pictures, collages and role playing, these drawbacks of using CAQDAS are obviously quite significant.

This special issue contains a variety of approaches to using projective techniques in marketing research and illustrates some of the advantages and insights that can be gained by using this approach to research. We urge both the academic community and practitioner companies to keep this research tradition alive by teaching students and new researchers about the usefulness of projective techniques.

Clive Boddy, Robin CroftGuest Editors