I spent the better part of the last three days sitting in a room with representatives from research associations in 10 countries going through the ISO 20252 section by section if not word by word. We had two overarching goals: (1) to make the standard independent of any specific data collection technology and (2) to incorporate the experience that comes from having certified almost 300 companies worldwide. I confess that I also was doing my usual monitoring of Twitter and LinkedIn, imagining that I was somehow staying connected to the "real world." That world generally doesn't have a whole lot of respect for the work we were doing in Toronto. It thrives on the latest factoids about people's use of social media, airy statements from big CPG research buyers about creativity and insight and the futility of asking questions to learn about what people think. Maybe I'm following the wrong people, but there seems to be precious little talk about best practices, about gathering information in a disciplined way, and clearly walking clients through the steps we took to get to those insights we're delivering. You can't blame me for wondering if my time in Toronto was being well spent.
That's the point at which I reminded myself of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's famous admonition, "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts." Call me naïve, but I think the primary goal of research still is to help clients make evidence-based business decisions. Gathering that evidence in a systematic and transparent way so that others (for example, clients) can evaluate it as we have evaluated it and follow our reasoning to the insights we're offering is essential.
You often hear it said these days that research is part science and part art. ISO is focused on the science part and you really have to wonder why some people find it so scary.