Qualitative Research Techniques: Projective Techniques: Completion, Comparison

Questionnaires

Basic questions and surveys can provide you with a lot of information. Giving your consumers sets of questions can help you record their response to your brand. What’s more, this is a perfect technique to find out the thoughts and feelings consumers might have about your brand. You can even make the questions specific and inquire about particular features of your products as well as the overall experience.

Customer Behaviour

To understand how your customers make their purchasing decisions, you have to look closely at their behaviour. You can use oral and written surveys to see what your customers factor in when they make their choices. Furthermore, you can also find out if they give some factors a certain level of priority, or if they make their purchasing decisions at a specific time of the year, etc.

Open-End Questions

Open-end questions, or free associations, are the perfect way to measure brand exposure, image, and awareness. Here’s a good example. Ask your consumers what the first thing that comes to their minds when they hear the name of your brand is. Based on their answers, you can see if they have an emotional attachment to the brand.

However, you can’t just ask your questions willy-nilly. You have to design them properly, so they lead you to the information that’s crucial to you. Furthermore, there also has to be a hierarchy of questions. You should start by asking about the overall image and then move down to more specific issues that deal with particular features or product attributes.

Projective Techniques

Projective Techniques are indirect and unstructured methods of investigation which have been developed by the psychologists and use projection of respondents for inferring about underline motives, urges or intentions which cannot be secure through direct questioning as the respondent either resists to reveal them or is unable to figure out himself. These techniques are useful in giving respondents opportunities to express their attitudes without personal embarrassment. These techniques helps the respondents to project his own attitude and feelings unconsciously on the subject under study. Thus Projective Techniques play a important role in motivational researches or in attitude surveys.

Important Projective Techniques

Completion Test: In this the respondents are asked to complete an incomplete sentence or story. The completion will reflect their attitude and state of mind.

Word Association Test: An individual is given a clue or hint and asked to respond to the first thing that comes to mind. The association can take the shape of a picture or a word. There can be many interpretations of the same thing. A list of words is given and you don’t know in which word they are most interested. The interviewer records the responses which reveal the inner feeling of the respondents. The frequency with which any word is given a response and the amount of time that elapses before the response is given are important for the researcher. For eg: Out of 50 respondents 20 people associate the word “Fair” with “Complexion”.

Construction Test: This is more or less like completion test. They can give you a picture and you are asked to write a story about it. The initial structure is limited and not detailed like the completion test. For eg: 2 cartoons are given and a dialogue is to written.

Expression Techniques: In this the people are asked to express the feeling or attitude of other people.

Disadvantages of Projective Techniques

• Highly trained interviewers and skilled interpreters are needed.
• Interpreters bias can be there.
• It is a costly method.
• The respondent selected may not be representative of the entire population.