Research training and the pursuit of insight
To celebrate 75 years in the business, we have invited BMRB managing directors and chairmen, past and present, to write about issues concerning the market research industry. The second in this series of articles is by Malcolm Rigg who was at BMRB from 1999 until 2004 firstly as Director of Social Research and ultimately as Managing Director.
How often do we hear the word insight? All clients want it. Researchers claim they provide it. But no one seems able to say what it is, where it comes from or how we acquire it.
It originally meant a mental vision and became a psychoanalytical concept usually described like this: (Answers.com):
“a process whereby one grasps a previously misunderstood aspect of one's own mental dynamics. It refers to a specific moment, observable during the treatment, when the patient becomes aware of an inner conflict, an instinctual impulse, a defence, or the like, that was previously repressed or disavowed and that, when it emerges into consciousness, elicits surprise and a sense of discovery.
Two forms of the experience have been described. The first involves a feeling of sudden discovery or illumination—a kind of "Eureka!" moment. The second is a slower, more gradual process where the subject and usually the analyst as well experience a sensation of the obvious: "Yes, that's how it is. We knew this, of course, but now it's perfectly clear." In all cases, something other than simple intellectual comprehension is involved.”
Its features are:
- the capacity to discern or penetrate the true nature of a situation;
- the act or outcome of grasping the inward or hidden nature of things or of perceiving in an intuitive manner.
It is revelatory: instinctual, intuitive not logical. The main difficulty is that the word and the way it is used and described imply that it contains the ‘true nature’ of things. Unfortunately insights may just be plain wrong! Equally unfortunately, as it’s mystical, we don’t know how to develop it unless we re-cast it using different terms. Using the mundane word ‘understanding’ instead has the virtue of subjecting what is claimed to be understood through ‘insight’ to scrutiny: can we arrive at the same understanding through analysis and evidence or can we at least corroborate insights using these methods?
Much of our research understanding emerges out of a process of engagement often involving many people. In pharmaceutical research, a topical subject given recent debates on the effectiveness of antidepressants, it’s a long held belief that random controlled trials involving random allocation of trial drugs and placebos can deliver conclusive evidence of effect because the placebo won’t work. It’s intuitively obvious that they shouldn’t but unfortunately it’s untrue. Some of the most interesting and insightful findings are published in a book by Moerman[1]and reported by Elliot[2] reveal:
- people who take their placebos diligently get better faster than those who only take them occasionally;
- placebo injections work better than placebo pills;
- the placebo response is highly variable across cultures: for example, blue placebos work better than red ones – except for Italian men, for whom the reverse is true; and Germans with ulcers respond to placebos at twice the rate of other people, but have the lowest placebo response for blood-pressure.
Placebos should not work at all so this is all very annoying. Our intuitive understanding has let us down. What to do? Ask another question. What is a good predictor of the placebo effect? Is it something to do with patient gullibility? It turns out that there is no reliable relationship between the placebo effect and the characteristics of patients. The answer comes from a couple of elegant studies, themselves using a variation on the traditional experimental design. This showed that the placebo effect is highly dependent on the relationship between patient and doctor. There was an ulcer-treating drug, for instance, that seemed to be losing its efficacy over the years – researchers found this wasn’t due to changes in its ingredients, but to another drug coming onto the market which doctors believed to be better because it was new. Judging between two different drugs may therefore be as much a matter of understanding social psychology as of assessing pharmacological potency.
Four things stand out for me about this research. One is that a straightforward notion of intervention and effect, often associated with Random Controlled Trials, can be far too mechanistic to be of reliable use even in clinical medical tests: people are not and cannot be reduced to machines. Another is that the understanding derived from this research could, paradoxically, be arrived at by using a good experimental design! The third is that the thinking that led to devising these studies and generating these findings is of an incredibly high order, involved several people, flashes of insight and lots of hard work. And finally, that these findings have considerable relevance for our understanding of branding and indeed the role of faith in contemporary society.
Marketing success usually requires building on our knowledge, and developing and combining disparate strands of understanding in creative and strategic ways. It also involves teamwork. An example of this is the COI smoke alarms campaign[3] which decisively cracked consumer, retailer and producer resistance to smoke alarms. The Home Office brief dolefully charted the failure of previous campaigns and admitted that this was the final attempt to change attitudes and behaviour. The research identified the incorrect perceptions about household fires and smoke alarms, the emotional strings to pull and the messages that the campaign needed to deliver. The planners persuaded the trade to stock up, drop prices and promote heavily at point-of-sale, and the creative team developed stunning ads in response to an incisive brief. The tracking research and the sales data from the test market persuaded the client to roll out nationally.
We need insight into how society works and how people behave not merely as an output from research but as input to research design and, importantly, in making unlikely connection by combining disparate elements of understanding. Can we train and develop researchers to become more insightful? We use competency models to describe the skills, knowledge and judgement that we think are appropriate to different levels of performance. A useful generic model is provided by Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986). Their five-stage typology of developing expertise runs as follows:
|
Stage |
Characteristics |
|
1 Novice |
Rigid adherence to taught rules or plans Little situational perception No discretionary judgment |
|
2 Advanced Beginner |
Guidelines for action based on attributes or aspects. Situational perception still limited All attributes and aspects are treated separately and given equal importance |
|
3 Competent |
Coping with "crowdedness" Now sees actions at least partly in terms of longer-term goals Conscious deliberate planning Standardised and routinised procedures |
|
4 Proficient |
Sees situations holistically rather than in terms of aspects Sees what is most important in a situation Perceives deviations from the normal pattern Decision-making less laboured Uses maxims for guidance, whose meaning varies according to the situation |
|
5 Expert |
No longer relies on rules, guidelines or maxims Intuitive grasp of situations based on deep tacit understanding Analytic approaches used in novel situations or when problems occur Vision of what is possible |
This model describes a process of development. The fourth stage envisages a move away from rules based behaviour towards holistic, streamlined, integrated thinking and the ability to understand and respond effectively to context. The expert stage takes us into the realms of intuition based on a deep unspoken level of understanding but, as necessary, a return to analysis to check that the evidence and the argument can be made to support their understanding or to address puzzling outcomes.
Another way of looking at this is provided by Atherton[4]. He proposes that four dimensions are involved in understanding ability:
- Competence: the simple ability to perform the requisite range of skills for practice.
- Contextualisation: knowing when to do what. It is the additional skill of flexibility, discrimination and discretion which enables a practitioner to select the appropriate method for the situation. The competent researcher has a range of skills: the contextualising researcher knows which ones to draw on in a given situation. Knowing when to do what is the beginning of strategic thinking.
- Contingency: the flexibility to be able to cope when things go wrong. It implies a great depth of understanding of the situation, which can be drawn upon to develop a strategy for action which does not simply rely on predetermined recipes. All learning and knowledge creation is likely to include elements of trial and error.
- Creativity: the capacity to use all the "lower" level skills in new ways to solve new problems. As with all these pyramid models, the top level tends to be vague and aspirational (but recognisable when you get there).
These higher level skills are extremely difficult to teach in any field and perhaps can’t be taught at all but only stimulated and encouraged. A commonly used model of professional expertise is based on Donald Schön's (1983) idea of "reflective practice”. This highlights the value of intensive decision-focused case studies in developing these skills. Case studies can simulate the conditions and the multi-layered issues, values and dilemmas that arise in real world decision-making. There are obstacles to providing this kind of training. Cases require resources to develop and to run. It means getting much in demand colleagues and partners together for several days to share learning experiences. If real gains are to be made then time must be allowed for individual and collective reflection on the process and the value of the experience asking what have we really learnt from this and how can we put it into practice?
Ultimately successful commercial and policy research depends on deeply engaging with the issues that give rise to the research and with the clients and stakeholders who make or influence decisions. Important decisions are always complex. They involve costs, opportunity-costs, uncertainty, risk and have unintended consequences. Our place at the table depends on our ability to negotiate this challenging terrain by offering research-rich expertise. We can’t teach people insight but we can and must support them in becoming more insightful.
[1] Moerman, D., Meaning, Medicine and the 'Placebo Effect, Cambridge, 2002.
[2] Elliot C. Scrivener's Palsy, London Review of Books
[3] Rigg M The Importance of Research in Planning and Developing Communications Campaigns in 'Public Information Campaigns & Opinion Research', H. Klingemann & A. Ršmmele (eds.) SAGE Publications, London. 2002.
[4] Atherton J S (2003) Competence, Proficiency and beyond [On-line] UK: Available: http://www.doceo.co.uk/background/expertise.htm.
References
Dreyfus H.L, Dreyfus S.E. and Anthanasiou, T. (1987) Mind Over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer Schön D.A. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action
Malcolm Rigg is Director of the Policy Studies Institute. He was at BMRB from 1999 until 2004 firstly as Director of Social Research and ultimately as Managing Director. Before that he was Director of Research at COI Communications. He has recently been elected an Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences. He is a Fellow of the Market Research Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is an Honorary Life Member of the Association of Survey Computing. He chaired the inaugural MRS Professional Development Advisory Board. His major research interests at present are sustainable development, well-being and the environment.
