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What is a Research Professional?

By crooky | February 27, 2008

Last night I was at an alumni event for Communications Co-op students from yesteryear and I had a conversation with a lovely young woman named Janna who was interested in moving out of more traditional marketing-communications activities into the specialized world of Market Intelligence and Research. I was at a bit of a loss because I wanted to tell her that it’s not rocket science but I didn’t really have any practical advice on how to transition into a full-time research role. So, in case Janna or anyone else interested in research as a profession is reading this, here’s my take on the job and a little bit of how I arrived there.

In my opinion, a professional researcher is a communications professional. Research at its core is the act of eliciting information from other people either directly (qualitative research) or indirectly (quantitative research). My grad school quantitative research professor - Kennedy Stewart - liked to tell us that the act of quantitative research is “turning words into numbers and back into words”. I like this analogy because it really captures the gist of the job.

1. Active Listening

A professional researcher must approach every problem as an active listener. Research is a labour-intensive project so if you misunderstand the problem you’re trying to solve or quantify, a “do over” can be very costly in terms of labour and your reputation. I always tell my clients “tell me what answers you need” and then I listen carefully and take copious notes. This helps me go away and develop a research methodology that will meet their needs.

2. Education and Managing Expectations

Your communications skills at the research development stage are extremely important. You need to make sure that questions and context don’t lead the respondents (whether its a survey, focus group, interview or other methodology) and you want to make sure that you get the answers you need. Managing the expectations of the research sponsor (in my case, my clients) is also really important at this stage because most people are relatively inexperienced at research design.

You also need to educate to a certain extent - clients or co-workers might not understand the difference between results that are statistically representative or not. They might also not understand why you ask certain demographic questions to help frame the results. You need to be up front and open to challenges when explaining these results. You also need to be flexible and make sure that the sponsor or client has final say after they’re fully informed of any consequences of their decision.

3. Conducting research

With the exception of surveys, your communications skills are very important when conducting the research. You’ll be leading discussions, interviewing people and managing the dialogue. This is harder than it sounds. People tend to wax philosophical about anything that pops into their head because, let’s face it, most people don’t get asked their opinion on things. It’s like you have opened the floodgates. Taming this outpouring of input is a job in itself.

4. Analysis

Once you’ve got the input you sought, you need to harken back to the input you got from the research sponsor/client back at the beginning of this process. They should have given you all the context you need to analyze the results that you have just collected. If they haven’t, you’ll need to go back and ask for more information.

Your analysis should address only the questions sought and should refrain from roaming into uncharted territory. It’s tempting to draw useless conclusions because they are interesting. Focus is key at this stage. There’s no magic involved in the analysis stage. I’m a big subscriber of Bardach’s Eightfold Path which can be applied to just about any research project. If you use Bardach’s framework from the beginning of your research project, you’ll arrive at a good answer.

5. Tell your Story

As Bardach says, at some stage you need to decide on what is the right answer and then you need to communicate that answer back to the client/sponsor in a way that’s compelling and easy to understand. Again, your communications skills are key here. You want to make sure to avoid being too prescriptive because no client/sponsor wants to be told what to do. What they want are options with the pros and cons of each clearly described. You should tell them things like “based on the research, it looks like the best option is XXX but it’s more expensive than YYY. You need to look at the tradeoffs and decide for yourself which is the best option.”

My story

I started out as a tradesperson and found myself in my first marketing/communications role at the age of 18. I completed by BA in Communication at SFU but minored in public policy through a special research division at the School of Communications. I landed in research in no small part thanks to my co-operative education experience. While working as an internal communications officer with Natural Resources Canada in Ottawa, I was getting assignments that required me to do more than write. I needed to dig, interview people, do research and analysis and make recommendations as a part of my communications duties. In essence, I was doing “public policy lite”.

After my second co-op stint, I came to realize that what I loved was the research. I quit my job in 2001 as a marketing manager of a magazine and begged my former professors at SFU to hook me up with a research job. Shortly thereafter, I landed a role as a Research Analyst with the Science Council of BC. That’s how I got into this kind of work.

It’s one path, for sure but I’m not sure how replicable it is. I’m always happy to talk to folks about working as a researcher so if you have any specific questions, drop me a line.

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

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Topics: Research Methodologies |

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