Why? Because! Research for a good cause.
Market & social research has to date played a very limited role - to my knowledge - in the management of the current coronavirus pandemic.
I'm not aware about qualitative projects with a remit to "help" - informing intervention targetting for example and shaping communication strategies.
If that's the case, maybe Governments are missing a trick here.
Test stations may well be equipped with a questionnaire where people are asked to tick a box on a quant questionnaire from a number of options where they might have been exposed to the virus.
Such approaches whilst structured, and allowing a taxonomy of sorts, have limited diagnostic power.
"Qual" has a unique ability through storytelling to get to the bottom of things. People often open up quite quickly - when you actually talk to them empathetically.
Sounds oblique?
The Power of Storytelling
Well, let's take the source of COVID-19 infection data in Germany public data . Many "occasions" are of diffuse origin - people don't know where they got the infection from.
Possibly. Would you even remember all the possible places and people you had been to and interacted with over the past 10 days?
Or - let's be frank - would you fess up to a bit of off-the-record social distance rule breaking that resulted in a positive test?
A recent conversation with one of the local traders in my area of Berlin was sobering. The gent in question was quieter than normal, so I asked how he was.
Fine - but his son wasn't well, had bad fever, was in bed, seemed to be all the symptoms of COVID-19. And he couldn't get an appointment for a doctor or a test - which seemed incredible and alarming a the same time. Rubbish system. Oh dear.
I was alarmed, concerned - and after expressing my sympathy and good wishes asked if he had any idea how his son had become infected.
No idea he said. He had done everything by the rule book. Just that about ten days ago he had been for a few drinks with some of his friends locally, they had enjoyed themselves.
Qual for Good - at Scale?
Imagine research done in a sort of double-blind situation across the world - where neither the observed nor observer were briefed on the precise topic or objective, but were engaged in storytelling and listening exercises.
Sort of a qual brief. Even better at scale.
I started my career in research in a company called Mass Observation in London, Acton Town. It had an interesting history - was one of the first UK companies to engage in wide spread social research. It's task - in the 1940s - for its millions of "mass observers" was to listen to people in pubs, at bus stops, in shops across the country and write down what they heard in relation to the 2nd World War effort.
GDPR might frown on this nowadays - although its no different in essence to digital social listening, except in real life. And social distancing during the fieldwork might be a problem.
But it might be a way of getting beyond the "I don't know where I got infected" challenge.
It would also help in informing hypotheses about high risk audience segments - qual invariably develops plausible pen-portraits as a pre-cursor to quantification that resonate as rooted in invidividual narratives.
Scientists, decision makers, policy wonks, journalists - many folk could and hopefully will benefit from the up-close-and causal-narrative of good qual research.
Curious, as ever, as to others' views.