Qualitative Research Methods in Consumer Psychology

Ethnography and Culture

Paul Hackett

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138085909
• eBook ISBN: 9781317690276
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Consumer Behaviour
• Index: Psychology

While consumer research is founded on traditional quantitative approaches, the insight produced through qualitative research methods within consumer settings has not gone unnoticed. The culturally situated consumer, who is in intimate dialogue with their physical, virtual and social surroundings, has become integral to understanding the psychology behind consumer choices. This volume presents readers with theoretical and applied approaches to using qualitative research methods in ethnographic studies looking at consumer behavior. It brings together an international group of leading scholars in the field of consumer research, with educational and professional backgrounds in marketing, advertising, business, education, therapy and health. Researchers, teaching faculty, and students in the field of consumer and social psychology will benefit from the applied examples of qualitative and ethnographic consumer research this volume presents.

1 Integrating Ethnographic Consumer Research Using Facet Theory and the Mapping Sentence

Paul M.W. Hackett

Introduction

In chapter 3 of this volume, Jessica Schwarzenbach and I provide illustrations of some potential pitfalls and difficulties associated with the successful completion of qualitative research. In many of the other chapters in this book, claims are made that structuring and integrating qualitative research studies may be equivocal. Specifically, researchers may experience quandaries when attempting to: bring together different qualitative approaches within a single study, compare studies that employ different research approaches, and unify interpretations of findings from studies using multiple and varied qualitative research approaches. In this chapter, I will offer an approach to the amalgamation of the design and integration of results that arise from qualitative consumer research; namely, the mapping sentence (Hackett, 1995, 2013, 2014). The mapping sentence exploits the commonalities that exist between individuals’ perceptions and understandings of events. To explain the structure of the essay that follows, I initially make the following propositions: a template that enables us to clearly understand human behaviour potentially offers a framework for research into human behaviour; a template must incorporate commonalities in human behaviour to transcend purely individualistic accounts of behaviour; and a template may best be understood as metaphorical.

Facets, Metaphors, and Perception

In reading this book, you may be excused of thinking that each topic presented is discrete in nature; indeed, each topic is offered in a separate chapter, further reinforcing this belief. If the chapters are not to be understood as isolated, then how should these be arranged? I have ordered chapters along an approximate chronology of a research project. However, there are other arrangements that may be imposed upon the chapters. For instance, the topical contents of this book may be divided within five categories: planning, investigating direct action, investigating preverbal articulation, text-based analyses, understanding behavioural antecedents and outcomes. This organization of content presents topics under a category heading that is not mutually exclusive of other within category topics (there is some potential overlap). As category headings are not mutually exclusive, within category topics cannot be chosen to exclusively represent their category: indeed, some other part-to-whole (item-to-category) relationship exists. Furthermore, the selection of categories may be somewhat mercurial with other researchers choosing a different structure. However, metaphors, I assert, are by their very nature categories that are relatively consistent between individuals from a similar culture. Moreover, we seem to like metaphors and use them to explain things that are at the edge of our understanding via more readily comprehendible metaphorical examples. Metaphors are also useful in providing colour and vibrancy to more familiar situations. The use of metaphors can be seen in many areas of psychological activity; but in this chapter, I will be considering metaphors within the context of understanding how we conceive of qualitative research into consumer behaviour. This may not immediately appear to be an area that is in need of metaphorical explanations, but in the next few paragraphs I will claim, and illustrate, why I believe this is not the case.

Paul Churchland uses the metaphor of a camera to explain his thinking about the biological brain as “Plato’s camera” (Churchland, 2013) in which he also introduces the Map-Indexing Theory of Perception. In this essay, I conceive understandings of research into consumer behaviour¹ as being a process of semantic perception that is built upon our apprehension and understanding of the world we encounter which we then instantiate as enquiry. In trying to understand perceptions as being something more than just idiographic experiences, we are faced with the problem of how to meaningfully correspond any form of interpersonal indexing of, “. .. the concepts of one person’s conceptual framework onto the concepts of another’s, in such a fashion as to preserve sense, meaning or semantic identity across pairings effected by such a mapping”. (Churchland, 2007, p. 126). We face similar difficulties within a qualitative research project when attempting to meaningfully correspond one person’s reported universe of experience with that of another’s. However, by mapping metaphors we may speak of the cultural regularities in understandings between people and provide a possibly analogous correspondence between different individuals’ semantic representations.

To continue with perception, it is appropriate to think of our understanding of veridical perceptions as comprising a sensation and its semantic interpretation based upon what we have previously learnt about other, perhaps similar, sensations. I could at this point also speak about illusions, hallucinations, fictitious events, and other nonveridical perceptions and understandings as these too may be formed of some form of sensation and interpretation. However, in this short essay I take the position clearly set out by Searle (2015) in explaining perception as encompassing both veridical and hallucinatory percepts. Our senses ‘grab’ sensations from the situations in which we are present. In considering visual perception, Churchland (2013) speaks about the eye taking a photograph of the objects that are in its current field of view, a process that it accomplishes in milliseconds. The data we gather lasts a brief amount of time and is constantly replaced by other, more contemporary sensations. The speed of sensual replacement is usually so rapid that we typically experience sensations as a continuous stream rather than as discrete events.²What we have learnt about the world, within which we experience sensations, is that it is a world that varies little and is composed of events and items that most often do not change significantly over time.

Churchland (2013) sees the learning brain as possessing enduring symmetries through, which over an extended period, we construct an understanding of our veridical experiences as being fundamental, tangible, or intangible ideas that are intelligible through reference to relatively permanent learned relationships. Thus in our daily encounters with the world the brain accesses and uses sensations gathered through the senses in tandem with our learnt and assembled store of neural representations. The brain-based storage system, Churchland proposes, takes the form of high-dimensional maps (understood as a metaphor of representation that allows correspondence, as mentioned earlier) of exceptional resolution and containing features of the specific domain. These maps have an enormous number of intricate interconnections that embody the similarities and differences between events as a represented conceptual framework, which enclose a person’s probable array of procedural activities and events.

Our internal maps, which, to varying degrees, approximately correspond to the world around us, allow us to form expectations and develop understandings. One of the features of a map that makes it useful is that locations can be indicated by, for example, the longitude and latitude coordinates of a cartographic map or some other systematic catalogue. In our everyday lives, we can similarly locate ourselves within our physical world through our sensations in reference to our mental maps. Furthermore, a similar undertaking can be seen to account for the process of understanding ‘things’ and specific and generalized events. How we understand an object is based upon the sensations we gather from the object through reference to our semantic maps or conceptual frameworks.

To further explore the notion that sensations are mapped to externalities through a process of correspondence, Churcland (2013) notes how the activity of our senses is related directly to our more generalized abstract feature domain maps: This mapping process locates us in possible objective situations. Sense organs, he says, have time-based signature patterns across n levels of simultaneously activated specific neurons that are related to that specific sense modality: a pattern of activity that embodies a situation relevant map. This neuronal activity signature specifies abstract features that are encountered to a specific coordinate location within space of n dimensionality. Churchland claims that, if we did not have internal maps that are available to our senses to index from, we would not be able to understand our world. These maps, he says, continually index our, “... many feature-space maps to provide us with an unfolding understanding of our unfolding objective world-situation”. (Churchland, 2013, p. ix).

Here I am asserting that mapping allows a meaningful understanding of something we perceive rather than the rudimentary sensing of such events, whereof the process of perception is based upon the sensations which we experience couched within our conceptual frameworks. In this chapter, I will claim this bipartite framework is necessary to develop a metaphorical template that allows the development and analysis of qualitative research into consumer behaviour. In addition, if we navigate our world through our senses and concepts then it seems reasonable to posit that senses and concepts structure human behaviour, and a similar framework will prove appropriate in designing research to investigate human behaviour.

I also noted earlier that, whilst our sensations are registered rapidly and are precise and situation specific, our conceptual frameworks are made of abstract universals that transcend specific locations and times. I commented upon metaphors being one form of abstract universal. In this essay, I will be using the facet theory approach from which I will borrow its mapping sentence as a framework, and within this structure I will identify conceptual templates of specific empirically based abstract universals for identifying subsections for the qualitative research process. The mapping sentence, I will claim, when understood within an analogous extension of Churchland’s map-indexing, is a metaphorical categorical structure; a metaphor of the research process that may be used to facilitate the design and analysis of ethnographic consumer research.

Unifying Qualitative Consumer Research

Facet theory is an approach to research in the social sciences and humanities that attempts to understand the combined concurrent influences of multiple factors upon a specified domain (see, Canter, 1985). Facet theory achieves this by breaking down a research project or research area into parts that are meaningful to respondents and then attempting to reassemble these parts in a way that provides greater understanding of the parts and of the meaningful whole. Using the process of theoretical disassembly and theoretical/ empirical reassembly increases the likelihood that research will precede with clearly and meaningfully defined content and research design. This mereological³ approach to the understanding of a research domain and the research procedures being used to investigate it is realized through clear and explicit establishment of a context specific definition know as a mapping sentence. Facet theory, using the mapping sentence, has addressed research design and has produced increased understanding of a wide range of research domains (Hackett, 2014). I will later employ the mapping sentence in relation to the domain of qualitative consumer research. I will be using the mapping sentence as Elizur suggests because: “The mapping sentence presents the complete research design in the form of a sentence which is easy to comprehend”. (1970, p. 55). Thus facet theory is concerned with the study of the mereological nature of human experience.

The identification of a domain of interest is the initial task when undertaking facet theory based research. This definitional ‘whole’ is then subdivided into categorical parts which taken together define the content of the specified domain.⁴ The facets or categories that are employed by an individual to structure the way they understand their life experiences are cardinal in attempting to appreciate human life. Facet theory incorporates this notion of the “essentiality of categories” to disassemble an interest domain into parts that are significant to the individuals or groups of interest. Having meaningfully dissected a domain in this way, these components are reassembled into a totality in a manner designed to provide greater understanding of the whole domain through explicitly stated context specific definitional categories. Within qualitative consumer research, the employment of such definitional categories is of importance in enabling research with well-defined content. This definition will likely yield research results that are valid, reliable, and which accurately address the research area interest.

Mapping sentences are constructed through including in their composition mutually exclusive components of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: What Is Consumer Ethnography: The 'Big-E' and 'Little-e' in Consumer Researchi?
• 1 Integrating Ethnographic Consumer Research Using Facet Theory and the Mapping Sentence
• 2 Ethics in Qualitative Consumer Research
• 3 Recruitment and Sampling in Consumer Research
• 4 Ethnographic Caveats
• 5 Inference and Hypothesis in Ethnographic Studies
• 6 Ethnography 1: Revisioning Teenage Pregnancy Using Participant Observation: Life in the Happy Hut
• 7 Ethnography 2: Field Observations, Questionnaires, and Focus Group Interviews at a Water Park
• 8 Autoethnography in Consumer Research
• 9 Focus Group Interviews
• 10 Using Projectives to Uncover "Aha Moments" in Qualitative Research
• 11 In-Depth Interviews
• 12 The Dynamics of Ethnographic In-Depth Interviewing
• 13 Action Research: The Bindjareb Yorgas Health Program
• 14 Ethnographic Research into the Consumer Environment: The Environment of Luxury Goods as a Space to Fight For
• 15 Researching Virtual and Real-World Possessions, Artifacts, and Archives
• 16 Visual and Sensory Ethnography
• 17 Ethnography: Textual Methodology
• 18 Netnography: Possibilities and Resourcefulness
• 19 Neuroscience Research Approaches: Developing an Ethnography of Non-Conscious Consumer Behaviour
• 20 Software in Consumer Ethnography
• 21 Consumer Heterophenomenology
• Contributors
• Index