Sometimes I am slow to catch on

I've been on vacation and literally the last thing I did before I left was to read a piece in IJMR by Martin Oxley and Brendan Light titled, "Research 2.0: engage or give up the ghost?"  As I mulled it over on the way to the airport it dawned on me that this mixed bag of issues, ideas, and problems we lump under the general heading of "online" has four distinct themes to it.

The first of these themes is related to how we adopt traditional question and answer formats to the Web.  Mostly this is about how we transition from interviewer administration to self administration and from aural to visual.  This is the space where the academic-based survey methodologists have done a lot of good work with some worthwhile contributions from MR research on research.  This is also the turf of the Flash evangelists who I cynically view as more about promoting a business model than doing good solid methodological research.

The second theme is really a major paradigm shift and is all about changing how we extract (if that's the proper word) the information we need from people.  Rather than asking respondents (again, if that's the right word) questions that require them to translate their reactions, thoughts, opinions, etc. into words it tires to provide images and symbols as the main answering devices.  That's the essence of what Oxley and Light describe.  These methods have generally been more widely promoted and used in Europe than elsewhere.

The third theme is focused on the people whom we interview (again, if that's the right word).  This is where we get into all of those arguments about representivity, professional respondents, satisifcing, etc.  There probably has been more work in this area than the others, especially in the US, but how much light is being shed remains an open question.  This has been mostly about access panels but increasingly now is about social networks. Rightly or wrongly, this has been the turf where the debate about the quality of online research has been joined.

Finally, there is the "listening" theme.  This is all about harvesting the ongoing conversation of the Web to help clients understand how their products and brands are being perceived.  Too often it's not just about listening, but also about intervening which creates an interesting dilemma for researchers around where research ends and marketing begins.

Maybe this has been obvious to other people all along, but it's been a revelation of sorts to me.  I always find it easier to understand a problem when you can compartmentalize it and look at its pieces one at a time.