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Protip: research accountability

By crooky | April 2, 2008

There are lots of reasons why you might want to do qualitative or quantitative research and just as many reasons why you need to be accountable for your work. This posting covers some of these reasons and how you can cover your ass in case a client wants to know what you’ve been doing.

1. Due dilligence

Whenever you are doing market research where investment dollars might be involved, you need to generate a paper-trail. In this post-Enron era, it’s difficult to take a leak without due dilligence.

What does due dilligence around market research look like? Mostly it’s keeping accurate electronic and print records of who you talked to, when you talked to them and what you talked about.

2. Repeatability

Good research should be repeatable and verifiable. I’ve never had a client re-check my work but if they want to (or if they want to hand the work off to someone else to finish), you need to keep a good paper trail to facilitate that.

3. Auditability

In some cases, you will be doing work for a project that has legal or policy implications. In these cases, the client might be obligated by law to audit your findings. I more frequently find myself in the role of auditor than auditee but it could happen.

Personally, I’ve used two systems - excel spreadsheets and a custom research tracking solution that my friend Phil Carr from Canada Connects in Ottawa built for a nanotechnology project I was working on recently.

The excel system works fine but is vulnerable to your computer’s mortality. If your harddrive dies or someone steals your computer, your data and your auditable paper trail are gone.

One solution you can use to get around this - use Google Docs. The added bonus with google docs is that you can share the spreadsheet with other people working on the project so that lots of people can collaborate.

The software solution that I used was web-based and allowed me to track phone calls and a web survey, attaching responses to phone calls and divinding up the work between several researchers.

This worked well but might be overkill if you’re working with less than 50 research subjects. Once you start to get into really serious research campaigns, you might want to look at a commercial task management solution.

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Aaron “Crooky” Cruikshank is the Principal and Founder of Friuch Consulting. He has written professionally about science and technology

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Topics: Research Methodologies |

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