Researchers Ask Qual or Quant. Stakeholders Want Outcomes
By Conveo
- article
- AI
- Artificial Intelligence
- AI Moderated Interviews
- AI Agents
- Conversational AI
- Conversational Surveys
- Qualitative Research
- Qual-Quant Hybrid
- Remote Qualitative Research
- Remote User Testing
- Concept Testing
- Customer Experience (CX) Feedback
- Depth Interviews
- User Experience (UX) Research
- Webcam Interviews
Summarise with AI
The question stakeholders bring to research isn’t whether it’s qual or quant. It’s how you’re going to help me decide what to do next.
For most of the history of consumer research, the tools we had made the qual/quant frame the practical way to organise the work. Lately, new methods have been blurring the lines, and that question has become easier to answer directly.
See Conveo in action in the webinar “Getting to the “Why”: Adding Qualitative Depth to MaxDiff” – this is a free webinar, part of the Demo Days Research & Analytics Tools taking place this June.
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Why the Frame Existed
The qual/quant divide has practical roots. For most of the history of consumer research, the only way to talk to thousands of people at a time was through a survey instrument, and surveys cap the qualitative depth you can reach. Two disciplines developed largely separately. Training paths split early. Budgets followed suit. Researchers learned to pick a side based on what they enjoyed or what they were good at.
The frame did useful work for as long as the tools held. It produced excellent practitioners on both sides, and the field built decades of careful methodology around it.
What’s Changed
What’s changed is the tools.
When you can have a real conversation at the scale a survey used to require, the wall between the two sides starts to look less structural. You can keep a method’s quant signal, the score, the ranking or whatever it is, and add a layer where respondents tell you why. Same participants, same study, both signals together.
This isn’t a story about one tradition replacing another. It’s about researchers having more options to deliver what stakeholders have been asking for all along.
Where You Can See It
The example I know best is MaxDiff. I’ve been working on a version that adds a real qualitative conversation about why people made their choices. MaxDiff has lived squarely in the quant world for 40 years. The first reaction I got from another researcher was “that’s like fairy dust”. The second was “wait, is that qual or quant?”.
Both reactions made sense, and the order of them is interesting. The fairy dust reaction was about what becomes possible. The category question came up afterwards, when the researcher tried to file the method somewhere and couldn’t.
What I Find More Useful To Ask
What I find striking is how varied the methods we already accept as qualitative are. A focus group is qual. A one-to-one depth interview is qual. Two days shadowing someone in their home is qual. A ten-minute conversation via a street intercept is qual. The depth and rigour across those four approaches differ enormously, and the category does a lot of work. It usually gets reopened only when something genuinely new arrives, and even then, the answer often turns out to depend on the scale you’re working at and what you’re trying to learn.
When I moved from agency-side to client-side, I started reaching for a different question. If I told my VP at Instacart a study was qualitative, she’d ask “okay, what’s the outcome?”. She wasn’t looking for a category. She wanted to know whether the work would help her make the next decision. That dynamic has stuck with me. It’s the question I still find most useful when I encounter something that doesn’t sit cleanly in one tradition.
Where This Is Going
New methods are going to keep arriving that don’t fit one tradition. Some will be structured techniques with conversation built into them. Some will be interviews at a scale that used to be survey territory. The conditions for that are in place: experienced researchers working closely with engineers who understand research, and tools that scale conversations in ways that weren’t possible before.
That’s the frontier of where research is going. The qual/quant frame isn’t going away. It still does useful work for the methods it was built around. But for new methods, the question stakeholders have always asked is finally a question researchers can answer more directly. That’s where the work is going to get most interesting.
See Conveo in action in the webinar “Getting to the “Why”: Adding Qualitative Depth to MaxDiff” – this is a free webinar, part of the Demo Days Research & Analytics Tools taking place this June.
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