Online Communities Deep Dive
The adoption of Online Communities for qualitative research is gaining traction as research teams learn about the method's flexibility and potentials. As fieldwork providers, we have been conducting more and more such projects and noticing that our clients are gradually digging deeper into the resources of platforms such as Recollective, Revelation, Lookback, and DScout, among others in this booming sector.
From our hands-on perspective, leaning into the daily moderation of Online Communities of diverse nature in studies deployment, we are learning a lot about the nuances and possibilities of the modality.
We are happy to share some findings and suggestions, and maybe inspire researchers and designers in the deployment of Community studies, and add objectivity and value to the process.
Although the platforms may be the same for Communities and Diary studies, their programming should follow specific approaches. For Communities, we found out it works better distributing the usual 90 to 120 minutes of total workload into no more than 4 days, thus keeping participants’ motivation and community cohesion - and consuming fewer resources overall. For Diaries, it makes sense to set longer time spans with short daily activities, but keeping an eye on avoiding redundancies.
Online Communities have a natural calling for dialogue, so having the activities guide fully structured beforehand can result in wasting opportunities to explore novelties beyond what was foreseen. Allowing space/time for new response-inspired activities during the live period can be effective and reinforce engagement, and less dependent on live moderators’ probing.
We often see similar questions repeated under slightly alternative angles, aiming to induce different answers. It’s a smart resource but should be used thriftily. If the formulation is too similar, the effects end up being negative: boredom for participants and redundancy for reporting. In short, refine your tactics by balancing the roles of the activities guide with the expected probing during the active period.
For best results, Communities should be really engaging (fun and interesting to take part in, from participants’ perspectives). It is worth investing time into carefully developing / choosing activities that will effectively allow room for creativity and inner repercussion. Also, consider cultural differences; for example, the often-used “write a love letter” question may sound odd or uncomfortable for participants in Latin America.
Explore the discussions feature among participants - this is rarely done! A good use could be formatting it into a guided activity, thus allowing an open space for unexpected ideas, quotes, and developments while keeping the scope under control.
Add a batch of quant questions as an activity near the end. It may be great to add some numbers to the concepts explored, but keeping it short and connected to the subjects discussed in the Community.
About continuity, if Communities are allowed to evolve after the original live period, a ‘respondents dream team’ could be gathered, and be used down the road to meet the demand for new studies by the same client / product. This can be resource-effective and a good way for refining the researcher’s strategic findings thru time.
Communities usually generate a huge mass of data easily downloadable from the platforms at the study’s end. We have been using Airtable to organize, make sense and extract insights from the data sets, and we find the tool excellent for this purpose. But this topic could become too long, so better leave it for another post!
Eitan Rosenthal
