Editorial

Citation

Tiu Wright, L. (2003), "Editorial", Qualitative Market Research, Vol. 6 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/qmr.2003.21606daa.001

Editorial

Conceptual underpinnings for research and methodological issues are a feature of this fourth issue in 2003. There are contributions from the UK and Australia. Specific benefits are identified and highlighted as well as showing the justifications for such methods in qualitative work.

The first paper by Richard Elliott and Nick Jenkel-Elliott sets about establishing basic principles in the use of ethnography for applied consumer research. Drawing from the anthropological, social, psychological and marketing literature, a wide range of examples are given from the social immersion of researchers in tribal cultures studied to modern day consumption habits and netnography in looking at the behaviour of groups on-line. While there is a limited section towards the end of the paper about ethnography in a commercial context, the paper provides a valid commentary of what can be learnt from using ethnography in the context of social and consumer studies. There are interesting parallels about what we can learn from the past to modern day observational methods.

The problem of how to study ethnic minorities within a culturally diverse society is considered in the second paper from Guilherme Pires, John Stanton and Bruce Cheek. The authors are concerned with the construction of a logical and systematic framework to deal with the problem of conducting market research about a particular ethnic group, the Portuguese minority living in Australia, and the lack of official statistics about this group. The authors go in search of initial information from experts and focus group discussions. The paper starts off with a research design that is exploratory. The paper concentrates in the main upon the broad ranging methods employed, from telephone interviews, face-to-face meetings, focus group discussions and tape recordings to the 6,496 observations collected from a questionnaire survey. There are fewer contexts given about Portuguese consumption habits as the thrust of the paper is about methodology. There is an inherent reliability in the work when the attitudes and behaviour of respondents are checked against a range of information gathered from informed experts and focus groups.

Another method for undertaking study in an under-researched area is provided by Sally Rao and Chad Perry in the third paper. The use of convergent interviewing reported in this paper stems from the development of a conceptual framework, as supported by ideas from other works, as indicated in their acknowledgements. The technique of convergent interviewing allows a researcher to question experts and after each interview to converge on issues within each topic so that further probing of respondents is carried out until a consensus on these issues, taking into account the agreements and disagreements, is finally reached. The technique is applied to relationship marketing and the Internet, to investigate the impact of the Internet on relationship constructs between firms and in the B2B setting. It leaves the reader wanting more because the focus on the methodology and comparison with other methods tend to overshadow the relationship elements and the discussion by firms about how they build relationships. However, the contribution of this paper is that it provides a clear description of convergent interviewing, how it can be used and in what kind of study. It appears apt for convergent interviewing to be adopted for studies about relationships and other complex issues and more of this technique will appear in the marketing literature as it gains popularity.

Customer relationship management and the evaluation of service encounters are important ongoing activities for businesses and attempts to measure them require an investigation into the variables that are related to the effective management of customer relationships by the firms concerned. This fourth paper by Amy Wong and Amrik Sohal reports on qualitative work with consumers about their patronage of and buying processes from retail stores, and their spread of positive and negative word-of-mouth behaviour. The setting for this work also comes from Australia, where exploratory work is undertaken to examine customer perceptions of positive and negative encounters with reference to critical incidents that affect their satisfaction, loyalty and their purchase and re-purchase intentions. The critical incident technique is explained. With the use of CIT and further information from interviews, the value of the technique is defended and the results with implications for managers are presented.

A philosophical justification for a realist approach is given in the fifth paper by Janine Stiles who examines the field of strategic alliance research and the benefits of having a combination of deductive and inductive methods. The paper discusses some of the key qualitative areas, such as the positivist and phemenological schools of thought in polarising the philosophical extremes for social research. Using references to previous studies, this paper provides a theoretical basis for using a realist approach with the argument that it helps in the interpretation of research and further exploratory work.

The section for "Practitioner perspectives" by Clive Nancarrow gives a flavour of the energetic fervour and dedication to market research by practitioners, with contributions from some academics. The setting is the previous Market Research Society Conference in March 2003. Having chaired at one of the MRS conference sessions in 2002, I can attest to the fact that much can be learnt from the practitioner-academic interface.

Julie Abbott and Mark Crasale from IBM have contributed an interesting overview for the "Internet news". They report on the types of products and services serving to maintain the impetus for the information technology sector with implications for qualitative work. There are important insights into this sector of relevance for academic and practitioner work.

Finally, I thank Rehan ul-Haq, this journal's previous Internet editor, for all his past work in building the Internet section in this Journal and for a creative "Cyberspace" special issue about the Internet for qualitative market research. This section has, in the past, benefited much from his drive, energy and intellectual capacity in previous issues. Since joining QMRIJ in its second year he has been energetic in developing links with others for the benefit of the Internet section. He is a management strategist who has taken a keen interest in qualitative market research and the Internet. He has been on sick leave in the past months. I look forward to his recovery and wish him well.

Len Tiu Wrightlwright@dmu.ac.uk