As one semester student of qualitative method for market research (MR) you must bear in mind that attending this course is unlikely to make you an expert in this discipline. It takes years to become a professional of market research industry¹. However, both if you want to join this exciting career or if you just want to make use of MR to fundament your future decisions as manager, the content of this semester it is going to help you to get familiar with this industry and at most to allow you a major expertise in one specific technique.

This post has been designed as a initial step to get familiar with some of the existing MR technniques², before further explanations on the particularities of each (bellow some of them are linked to Wikipedia, so that you can meanwhile obtain further info on your own).

Please divide the bellow techniques into qualitative and quantitative. Furthermore, as online research is becoming more and more relevant, try to do the same between the online and offline techniques. The result should be taxonomy of four quadrants: quadrant 1, online qualitative techniques; quadrant 2, online quantitative; quadrant 3, offline qualitative, quadrant 4: offline quantitative:

1. Online ethnography
2. Visual data
3. Telephone questionnaire
4. Online quesitonnaire
5. Online interview
6. In-depth interview
7. Self-administrated questionnaire
8. E-mail questionnaire
9. Online focus group
10. Participant observation
11. Secondary data
12. Content analysis
13. Focus group
14. Ethnography
15. Semi-structured interview

To see solution click on the image

¹ Many organization account for the today´s level of profesionality of this industry. For instance, the World association for market, social and opinion research

² note that technnique and method are frequently used as synonimus. However, it must be no-tticed that there are a slightly difference. For further details you can visit this site

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