How I work
A quarterly tracker, an interview programme with twenty executives and a piece of market-facing thought leadership are all research. Almost nothing about how you run them is the same.
Most of what follows comes from nine years running Adobe Digital Trends, and from programmes covering 115 countries.
The brief
A request for “a survey” isn’t really a research brief yet.
Before designing anything I want to know what’s already known, and what someone would do differently once the answer is in. That affects almost everything that follows, from who should be included in the study to the questions worth spending respondents’ time on.
Sometimes it turns out the answer has already been decided and the study is there to back it up. I’d rather establish that at the brief stage.
Design and fieldwork
The answer might be a survey, it might be interviews, and often the strongest evidence is already sitting in existing data, published research or the client’s own material.
For quantitative work I start from the cuts we’ll want at the end, and whether the sample can carry them. A 200-person sample split five ways gives you five groups of forty, not five findings. I watch how the questionnaire behaves in field, and who’s answering it.
Qualitative gets at what a questionnaire can’t: how people describe the problem in their own words, which is usually not how the brief describes it.
With secondary research most of the work goes on deciding which sources are comparable enough to sit in the same chart.
Where analysis goes wrong
Most analysis produces more than one defensible story, and the one that makes the best headline usually isn’t the one with the strongest numbers behind it.
So I check whether a gap that looks large is built on forty responses, and whether something else in the study contradicts it. I also look for the findings that don’t fit the hypothesis we went in with. Those are usually the ones the client hasn’t heard before.
There’s judgement in all of this. My line is that I won’t write a finding I couldn’t defend in front of the client’s own analysts.
What gets published
A big programme produces hundreds of numbers worth looking at. A reader keeps two or three, so most of my time on a report goes on deciding which.
That’s a full report for some programmes, a deck and a recommendation for others, or a set of shorter pieces off one evidence base.
There are examples in selected work. If something there looks like your problem, get in touch.