in a structure that is very simple and it hopefully makes sense for you.
So here it is, one way to look
at what methods to use when is to simply ask two very important questions.
The first one is does a researcher know the question that he or she wants to ask?
If the answer is yes, you're in the problem solving domain.
If the answer is no, you're likely in the problem identification domain.
The other critical question is whether the respondent knows the answer.
And even then, even if the answer is yes, you might subsequently want to ask,
will she actually reveal the true answer.
Such as in the case, for
example, of the likelihood of recycling that I had just mentioned before.
With these two very simple questions, you can see you're able to qualify or
place the different descriptive, causal, and exploratory research methods
in a simple framework, that will hopefully help you sort out through the problems.
This matrix is not meant to be comprehensive.
Within each one of these methods, I have only listed the most often or
most commonly used, such as surveys, in-depth interviews,
focus groups, observational methods and experiments or AB testing.
This takes more refer to in a web context and access to a secondary research,
either from internal company owned customer base or
external providers such as etc..
So for the first example, let's go back to our by now famous and
well known Santander Serfin example.
What methodology did they use to finally come up with a meaningful segmentation and
decide on a product to launch for its specific segments?