The current issue of Research
World has some nice pieces and I was especially struck by Simon Chadwick’s
editorial, “Doing more with less.” Simon
is as shrewd an observer of this industry as anyone, so it’s always interesting
to see what he has to say. In this
particular case I wouldn’t say that I disagree with him so much as I’d like to
see a slightly different nuance. Here is
the quote that caught my attention:
"There is no doubt that the very definition of research is
changing . . . .In the end, the value we provide lies less in how data are
collected and more in how we use them
and the stories we tell with them."
Over about the last ten years the industry as come to place an enormous amount of emphasis on "insight" and the development of more consultative types of relationships with clients. (In fact, I sometimes suspect that way too many of us harbor secret wishes to be consultants rather than researchers, but I'll save that for another day). Unlike consultants, ours is a fact-based profession and a key skill we have to practice every day is the careful evaluation of evidence, to see its strengths and its weaknesses, to figure out how the pieces fit together, and to understand the limits it places on the stories we can tell. All the stuff that David Smith has so neatly summarized in his "12 Killer Questions." One reads a lot of silly stuff these days about the kinds of people we need in MR and the sort of training we should be giving them, but in all of it the skills necessary to evaluate and interpret evidence get short shrift.
One would think that our experience with online panels would have taught us something, but then you see some of the claims being made for some newer methods and you can only shake your head. The sources and the methods are truly amazing, but their value is dependent on how we use them.
To be fair to Simon he also says that "this is not the time . . . to throw all of our hard-earned lessons out with the bath water–the 'new normal' does not imply that we need to overthrow everything that has served us well in the past." But that's exactly what worries me.