A Time To Reflect

charukesi November 2nd, 2006

Or… how does one quantify the human mind?

I recently (too recently for the memory to not be painful, so bear with me) filled in long questionnaire to get my personality type assessed. When I say long, I mean the thingy had over 500 questions. Yes, ouch. Ouch is what I said, along with true and false, given my noble intention of being brutally honest about myself. And at the end, the assessor totted up the scores and pointed out those scores which were above 70 - which brings me back to why 70? What is to say 70 is normal? - and therefore, er, the obvious aberrations (disorders?) in my personality.

I googled for this test and came across this phase among other eulogies of this test - breakthrough in objective psychological assessment now, here is the thing - how can psychological assessment be objective? And exactly how objective can you be in assessing another person? As it happens, the same article goes on to say that the test has been described as the most successful failures in the history of psychological test construction. Yet, for over fifty years, this test has been used extensively not just by clinical psychologists (as it was originally intended) but potential employers, law enforcers, wannabe divorcees…

And what is alarming is not that this and other such tests are administered freely (don’t even mention copyright - or ethics), they are often used as stand-alone measures of personality, and therefore, past and likely future behavior. This is what another article on such personality tests says - These tests are scattershot in their attempts to target liars, cheats, and thieves. According to a review conducted by the federal government’s Office of Technology Assessment, 95.6 percent of people who fail integrity tests are incorrectly classified as dishonest—an error rate far worse than that of the notoriously unreliable polygraph machine (emphasis mine).

My own experience was that I came away with a list containing numerical values and codes of the overwhelming defects in my personality - and not a whiff of a solution. No further talking and probing (there, I have said it- I am a qualitative researcher, after all) - no “subjective” validation (if you think that is an oxymoron, think again, we do it all the time) of the “data”…

Here is where we stop and take a look at some of the questions - and then slowly shake our in disbelief and wonder at the thought of attempts to quantify and measure human emotions and states of mind… So, why is the survey method not always the best? Two things -1. because the method is so blatantly unsuited for the kind understanding required to look into a human mind and 2. because as always, in such cases, the “data collection” instrument is designed in such a manner as to include all the cardinal sins of questionnaire design.

While I can go on and on about point 1., here is where I have actually gone on and on - about point 2. Read on if you are interested in these “cardinal sins” - Questionnaires that confuse and confound. And while I am at it, I quote Harini on what drives quantitative research - confusion on cause, causality, correlation and conjecture

• - Armchair Analysis
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charukesi October 22nd, 2006

This is another photograph that I took while on the cruise…

I had posted this on flickr without any explanation (no notes or details that I normally add to each photograph) and added no tags myself. I then invited viewers to play tag.

This is an interesting technique we often use in qualitative research - spontaneous association. So what does this image immediately make you think of? Go ahead, indulge me and play tag. One or two words… Thanks!

• Qualitative Research Trends
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charukesi September 23rd, 2005

‘Why do mind maps work?‘ from George Johnson of Between Seeing
(link via one of my favorite blogs, the innovation weblog)

They work because the brain operates in circles. A simple way to think about this is to think of millions of bits of information in the brain flowing in circles. When two bits of information intersect an idea is formed. Mind maps facilitate the collection of those bits of information, where as creating linear lists forces the brain to work in a way that is not natural for it and consequently you don’t get all of the information available to you.

Makes perfect sense to me - that is indeed the way everything - processes and tools - we use for thought and communication work - the internet (in its right name the world wide web) is a series of loops of one thought or idea (in the form of a link leading to another). And that is what blog conversations are all about too - picking up one thread and building upon it elsewhere.

This is what I feel about mind maps (and have said so in a comment on this post) - we have been conditioned to think linearly - in lists - whereas the natural way that thought flows is in circles. We all make mind maps every day without realizing it… linear thinking makes ideas unidimensional and restricted whereas “circular thinking” (for want of a better term) opens up new ideas and possibilities.

Yet people hesitate to adopt - or even acknowledge - such thought processes as natural and effective. As Johnson has said in his post, most of us are trained to think ’straight’ and with our left brains. Anything veering dangerously towards the right brain is suppressed, and even suspect (until of course one is universally recognized as a creative - if eccentric - genius!)

• The World of Indsight , - Alternative methods
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charukesi August 10th, 2005

Going through my technorati search, I found my post Anthropology at Intel linked to on this usability site.

And they also had this really cool pic…

(Anthropologist inspecting locals and viceversa - Link via usernomics)

This is what I meant when I responded to a comment on this post yesterday saying that while many companies do this, what makes only some studies significant is their use of local anthropologists and reseaechers in place of Western experts. The overall context of my thesis at the LSE was cross-cultural research and the need for adapting research techniques to suit the immediate socio- cultural framework of the target audience. And I found that the area I had looked at - rural research in India strongly vindicated this need. And my professor - from London - mentioned how he always took a local guide along when he did any research north of Glasgow. Language is just one of the issues - an outsider would take ages to get through even the initial understanding of local customs and culture. You would be surprised how a city-bred researcher Indian researcher can find herself easily out of depth in a village in India - especially if travelling with “city notions”…

***

Another site had linked to this post as well - this is the second time it is happening to me in a week - getting linked to by a site in a well, not just foreign but completely alien language. The first was when my post on the Big B’s bathing - or non bathing habits was linked to by a bollywood site in Netherlands. Atleast here, I did not understand a word of any of the posts but I spotted many familiar names on the site - check it out.

• The World of Indsight , Qualitative Research Trends , - Alternative methods
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charukesi August 9th, 2005

Product design is no longer about scientists sitting in their offices (mostly in the West) to develop products (for the entire world, including the inscrutable East - atleast where technology is concerned) and launching beta versions for testing and refining. Anthropological methods (tweaked to suit commercial needs) being increasingly used by large technology companies are taking design to the end user - observing their everyday interactions with the product and taking out insights that can be quite startling.

Lorenz of antropologi points to this article on Intel’s eforts at user research.

In a bid to eventually sell more chips, Intel plans to announce Monday that it has set up four new offices around the world that are staffed with anthropologists and engineers to help design computers with features for emerging markets.

Traveling from dusty rural villages in India to busy Internet cafés in Brazil, these Intel employees will collect data from weather to the content needs of people in regions where computers are not yet popular.

This effort began with China where Intel sent ethnographers to study how people interact with technologies. And they have plans for India too - Intel is working on a project targeting farming communities in India, where heat and unreliable power supply present challenges for keeping and using a PC. The company expects to launch a PC for this market next year, said Mr. Agatstein.

Here is an interesting observation study on mobile phone usage : Mobile Phone Users: A Small-Scale Observational Study

HP calls this process contextual invention - here is the HP research conducted study by HP in partnership with IMRB and Human Factors International - Contextual Invention: A multi-disciplinary approach to develop business opportunities and design solutions. This approach can be seen as a development of Contextual Design in which social and cultural factors are considered in the deployment of an existing technology. We call this approach Contextual Invention because the aim of the social science research is to inspire and generate new technology inventions with high social and business value. After an initial phase of ethnographic fieldwork looking at media use in India, the project team worked up new business and design proposals in three high-value areas.

• Qualitative Research Trends , Technology , - Alternative methods
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charukesi August 2nd, 2005

I had initiated a small research on my blog a long time ago. On understanding my generation. It was then trigerred by my loss of faith in the “younger generation” after they voted for Smriti Malhotra (of kyunki keta kapoor pays my salary fame) as a potential youth icon on MTV.

Someone recently wrote to me after seeing this post - she is doing her research on the Doordarshan era - to understand how it influenced our social perceptions. Reading her mail, I decided to restart this research again on this blog to see if it gets anywhere.

Here is the idea - partly taken from my earlier post (for which I lost all comments which came in when I transferred my blog to this new url) and edited…

And yes, this is not limited to my generation alone - if you have any interesting thoughts about your growing up years, do share them here…

I have been wading through many Indian blogs…. And came across quite a few Indian bloggers born in the mid-70’s..… What I see as the post-flower, pre-mouse generation…..

I was born in the mid 1970s…. And I am interested in understanding my age cohorts. The concept of age cohorts was highlighted by Rama Bijapurkar a few years ago in discussing cultural changes in India post liberalization. I’ve attempted to loosely explain the concept of age cohort : a group of people (who may be born around the same time frame) who grow up sharing the same social, cultural, political, educational experiences…

The concept of age cohorts is significant because this shared set of experiences determine the values and beliefs they will carry all their life. For instance, the post-war baby boomers in the US.

Coming back to my age cohorts, I am very curious about what experiences we grew up sharing…. That has shaped they way we are today… This idea kept growing when I realized how much my husband and I (who were born in the same year, 1975) had in common even though we grew up in different parts of India. Me in metro, middle-class Madras. And he in small-town AP. There are so many shared experiences we keep exchanging that I wanted to see if others of that time also empathized with this.

So what are these shared experinces?

Internet ? Technology ? : No, I don’t think we grew up with technology. We approached it as grown ups. (I do not consider a job with an IT company and being able to send e-mail as being “tech”). I am talking about being born internet-savvy, the way kids are today……

Communication ? : We saw the STD booth boom in the country….. is that significant ?
Or is it mobile technology ? Are we the typical sms generation ?

Liberalization ?: Certainly, we witnessed the birth of McD and the re-birth of Coke in India…. Reebok and Ford….. Is this significant ?

The Y2K demand ?

Coalition Governments ? Our youth witnessed the end of single majority parties and the birth of coalition politics….. the shape of things to come and stay…..

Private TV channels ? MTV ? The Bold and the Beautiful ? Quick Gun Murugan ? Cyrus Broacha ? Or is it Giant Robot ?

And where does Doordarshan fit in all this?

The end of Angry Amitabh and the entry of sugary Shah Rukh ?

Or is it a combination of all these ?

I thought it might be fun to share ‘growing up’ with others who grew up elsewhere in the country at the same time……… I do not want to get into a stricter definition of age limits… is too traumatic for me

The idea being :

1. to understand the events, ideas, values that have shaped my generation (mid-70’s born, the over-20, 30 ish)

2. to experiment with the possibility of blogs as a tool for primary research….. blogs as a tool for expression, blogs as a tool for lobbying….. and now this?

Personally, I would consider this data more credible because participation is voluntary and not coerced or coaxed as in case of conventional research…

This is going to be a sticky post for some time. Do leave your thoughts and spread the word around - hoping to see something interesting come out of this…

• Indiawatch , - Alternative methods
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charukesi June 16th, 2005

Was reading this line from Bill Bryson’s Short History …whether you are a lumper or a splitter, as they say in the biological world…. Any taxonomer can be either a lumper or a splitter.

Right, that is the difference between quantitative research and qualitative research.

Quantitative research lumps - studies large groups and identifies patterns across these groups - the smaller niggling inconsistencies and dissenting voices are pushed under the carpet - they may not be statistically significant (to use this term very loosely). Think of this in terms of a simple majority vote - what about the ‘minority’ that did not vote for the issue?

Qualitative research - is about splitting - qualitative research digs out similarities across groups (or audience segments) and keeps a keen eye open for differences within a group / segment - the lone dissenting voice - which often may go contrary to what the ‘lumped’ data suggests - but may be more significant than anything that the numbers signify - as marketer after disbelieving marketer has found out…

But this is not one of those age-old arguments about which methodology is better - I for one believe, methods is as methods does - but the debate will go on…

Here is another take -

a splitter is an individual who might spend hours pondering whether a glass is half empty or half full with water.
a lumper is an individual who observes a glass which is either half empty or half full with water, and declares that it is a glass of water.

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charukesi May 27th, 2005

Have a look at this Happiness Index published by a British organisation called City & Guilds
(Link through the FastCompany weblog). Hairdressers are the happiest workers in Britain: 40 percent say they are very content in their job (giving their careers a score of ten out of ten). Next in the happiness stakes are the clergy (24 percent ), chefs/cooks (23 percent ), beauticians (22 percent ), and plumbers, mechanics and builders (all 20 percent ). In contrast, only five percent of lawyers, IT specialists and secretaries/PAs, four percent of real-estate agents, three percent of civil servants and two percent of architects say they are extremely happy at work.

Why are hair-dressers happiest? Is it because no client ever dares argue with them - when they are at work?

Happiness measures are fascinating - especially when they give no explanation for the figures - and leave it entirely to the imagination of the readers. Why are so few architects happy, for instance?

As an aside, for my master’s degree dissertation at the LSE, I had started work on developing ‘quality of life’ indices for rural India - and gave up very early on as the scope of the work dawned upon me - deciding it to save it for my PhD… I would have needed a few years just to complete my literature review with any amount of honesty - there is so much work that has been done on quality of life and happiness all around the world… but almost all of them are based on Western notions of happiness - given that basic needs have been taken care of… but in a context like rural India, where does one even begin?

Read also : Who is happiest? and Is your job lovely or lousy?

• - Armchair Analysis
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charukesi May 17th, 2005

Here is an outsider’s view of the market research business - A question of questions - writes Rashmi Bansal. A jibe at QADR - Quick And Dirty Research - done by advertising agencies and clients to get a “feel” of the issue at hand - and also to cover their backside at the next presentation…. And some tips based on her experience with the Great Indian Survey Trick…

I have called it an outsider’s view - I am in the ‘inside’ - in the market research business…. And I am very interested in knowing your experiences with market research - surveys / interviews / focus groups… have any?
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Less than an hour after I wrote this, an interviewer paid me a call at home - with a questionnaire for DNA - and I was perfectly rotten about it - I wanted to see the questionnaire and had great difficulty in controlling my urge to tell him what I thought about the design…

But my experience was much like Rashmi’s - the boy asked for my name and some other details - and assured me that he would ask me only 1-2 other questions - while the questionnaire itself had around 10…

Boy : Which newspaper do you read now?

Self : TOI

Boy : Do you like it ?

Self : NO

Boy : Why ?

Self : * hesitation - where do I begin and why is he asking me open-ended questions *

Boy: Is it because it has too much glamour?

Self : * GET OUT *

A couple of thoughts
1. How glamorous can a newspaper get?
2. DNA is going to take this ‘research’ seriously and position themselves as a unglamorous newspaper?!

• Qualitative Research Trends
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charukesi April 5th, 2005

Fast-tracking research with paired interviews

(link through elearningpost)

Why why do research agencies still cling to conventional beaten-to-death techniques - even though in many situations it is not the best or most efficient method of data collection / analysis - so much so that qualitative research (atleast in India) has become synonymous with focus groups?

I was doing some research for a large agency recently - on television viewing habits and channel preferences - and data collection was through surprise surprise - focus groups - in that situati0n, paired interviews or even family interviews made so much more sense - television viewing is strictly a family decision and the kind of compromises / interplay between family members would have made for fascinating and useful data - by the time I got involved in the project, there was no scope for any thought other than focus groups… and I feel that frustration each time I encounter focus group situations where other simpler tools would have worked better…

• Qualitative Research Trends
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