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Methods Matter: Interviewing and beyond

The Royal Society, London
25 November 2008

What is the Forum?

The International Journal of Market Research (IJMR), published for MRS by WARC, is celebrating its 50th anniversary as the leading international journal for research practitioners and academics with an interest in this field.

As part of this celebration MRS is launching the IJMR Research Methods Forum, the first UK event to focus on the methodological challenges facing the research sector. This first Forum focuses on innovation in methodological developments.

Why is it needed?

The research sector has shown remarkable growth over the past fifty years. Essential to this growth has been the continuing ability to respond creatively to the changing needs of clients. In doing so, researchers have demonstrated their capability to successfully address new challenges, adapt to changing conditions, evolve methodologies and introduce new practices.

Market research techniques have also been successfully applied to an increasing range of issues across all sectors of the economy. However, despite the vital importance of methodology to research, there is currently no single event in the UK that focuses on the methodological challenges faced by the sector and provides a forum for debating the issues and discussing solutions.

Some of the challenges currently faced relate to traditional research practices, such as sampling, interview methods and respondent co-operation. Other challenges relate to new sources of information about consumers or citizens and their behaviour that do not depend on traditional sampling and interview methods to collect the data. All these challenges will be addressed in the Forum.

Who should attend and why?

Methodology is at the heart of research so the Forum will appeal to any market research practitioner, social researcher or academic with a serious interest in methodological issues and solutions.

By the end of the day delegates will have heard leading practitioners describe how they are addressing the challenges facing traditional research, and how the increasing opportunities to understand consumers and citizens through data collected in non-traditional ways can strengthen, enhance and expand the methodological base of the sector.


Programme

Morning Session: Challenges Facing Traditional Research: Developing Solutions

Chairman’s Introduction - Peter Mouncey, Editor-in-Chief, International Journal of Market Research

Keynote Speaker - Professor Paul Wiles, Chief Scientific Advisor to the Home Office and Director of Research, Development and Statistics

International/Mixed Mode Research - Sir Roger Jowell, Research Professor at City University London and Founder Director of its Centre for Comparative Social Surveys, Gillian Eva, Researcher, City University London

  • Challenges faced in conducting mixed mode international surveys
  • Examples of experimental research undertaken to develop solutions in major projects

Survey Design - Bill Blyth, Research Director, TNS Europe

  • Challenges researchers increasingly face in interviewing representative samples
  • Possible solutions to this dilemma

Sociologist View - Professor Mike Savage, Professor of Sociology, University of Manchester and Director of the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change

  • Why the days of the sample based survey might be numbered

Databases and Market Research - Martin Hayward, Director of Strategy & Futures, dunnhumby

  • The power of the customer database as a source of customer knowledge
  • Why there is still an important role left for traditional market research

Panel discussion

Afternoon Session: Everything but an Interview?

Media Research - Richard Windle, Managing Director, Ipsos MediaCT, Ipsos MORI

  • Media measurement: can technology replace interviews?

Qualitative Perspective - Gill Ereaut, Principal, Linguistic Landscapes and Rachel Lawes, Principal, Lawes Consulting

  • Spontaneously occurring data: researching what consumers are doing, not what researchers ask them to do

Panel discussion

Netnography - Anjali Puri, Director Product Development & Management, The Nielsen Company

  • Webnography: its evolution and implications for market research

Ethics - Dr Agnes Nairn, Affiliate Professor of Marketing, EM-Lyon Business School

  • Ethical issues facing researchers in the virtual world

Panel discussion

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