Beyond the Basics
New and creative strategies can refresh standard qualitative research tactics to gain more effective human insights. Market research leaders advise keeping prompts simple, setting realistic time limits, and providing a pressure-free environment.
There is a wide range of resources online that can help inspire the quality of your qualitative work. Quirkos’ list, from its blog “Creative and alternative qualitative methods,” provides several options that could work in the right environment with the right audience.
- Participant diaries. There is much more to diaries than just handwritten journals. You can also have audio diaries and video diaries. There are even diary apps for phones, which can notify participants at regular intervals to find out what they are doing or feeling. For certain research, especially where you want to minimize recall issues, regular recording in one of these ways can be really useful.
- Participant photography and photovoice. Although sometimes connected with diaries, getting participants to record their life through photo elicitation can get them to reflect on important issues, and provides a good basis for discussion. This is the concept of photovoice, where you give your participants a way to express their lives and experiences pictorially.
- Arts-based research methods. Many creative methods focus on different ways to integrate art into research. You can basically use any medium, but the idea is often to get participants to reflect on their life experiences and create something (a drawing, clay sculpture, collage) that expresses something connected to the research. A key part of the method is getting participants to either label and explain, or discuss with the researchers and other participants, the meaning and potential interpretations of their creations.
- Walking methods. If your research is connected to a place, or how people experience an area, there are many interesting approaches you can do with participants while walking with them through a place and getting them to explain their world. These have various names and variations such as the ‘walking interview,’ transecting or walking fieldwork. You can record these visually, aurally or with notes and pictures, or get participants to reflect on them afterwards.
- Mapping and network diagrams. Mapping is another good tool for getting people to explore and explain their geographical area with researchers, but it can also be used to demonstrate other things, such as connections between organizations people use, social networks, or how they see connections between concepts as in mind mapping. There is pictorial narrative mapping, body mapping which can be used to show pain, or getting local people to create and label a map of their area.
- Secondary analysis. The secondary analysis of other sources of data can be really interesting and insightful, and avoids a lot of practical and ethical issues. You can do document, media or social media analysis or even re-analyze someone’s existing dataset to see if it can reveal something about a different research question.
- Games and activities. When you do focus groups, don’t just facilitate dry discussion: use games and fun activities to get your participants engaged and sharing. You can use sorting and ranking exercises with cards you make with each card representing a part of the research. You can get people to discuss photos, newspaper articles, made up stories about a controversial issue or flip-charts where you get people to come up with ideas or answer difficult questions. Get people to move: show how strongly they agree with a statement by standing at different positions along a line. In each of these situations, the data can be either the outcome (where people stand / what people share) or the discussion that ensues.
- Participatory research. In some situations, it can be valuable to include participants in the data collection or analysis. In some paradigms they can be seen as the real experts of their own lived experiences, or an ‘insider’ can be a useful co-researcher. Often they are able to make sure that the most relevant questions are being asked, can act as gatekeepers to other participants that might be difficult to reach, or will have their own interpretations of the data that can challenge researchers.
- Observation and Ethnography. If you have the time to deeply engage with an organization or a group of people, researchers can become embedded in their research subject with ethnography or participant observation. Usually a researcher will spend weeks, months or even years watching and learning a research context firsthand, and it can give very detailed data and understanding. However, there are shorter variations of observation or ‘rapid ethnographies’ which can be a great complement to other qualitative research methods, verifying and expanding on other sources of data.
- Surveys. Surveys are often overlooked as a qualitative research method. They are a good way to reach out to lots of people, online, in person or by post, and you can be a lot more creative with questions. Get people to explain what they see in a picture. Use one word to express how you feel about something. Use emojis or get people to rate or rank statements. Ask questions about identity in different ways. Leave space for lots of open-ended answers, but choose creative and engaging questions to get people to think and reflect.
TMRE Session Spotlight: Unlocking Qualitative Techniques
During TMRE 2026, which will be held October 5-7, the double session, “Unlocking What’s Hard to Say: Creative Qualitative Techniques You Can Use Tomorrow,” will be presented by Jay Zaltzman, Former President, QRCA, and Sidney Jansons, Senior Manager of Consumer Insights, HelloFresh.
Some of the most valuable insights are also the hardest for people to articulate directly. In this hands-on Engagement Zone session, Jansons and Zaltzman will demonstrate creative qualitative techniques that help surface underlying associations, emotions, tensions, and meanings – and show how those techniques can inform real business decisions.
Drawing on both client-side and consulting perspectives, they will share examples of how projective and immersive techniques have been used in practice, including applications from HelloFresh. But this won’t be a sit-back-and-listen session: attendees will try the techniques themselves, see what they reveal, and discuss when and how to use them. Come ready to participate, experiment, and leave with practical approaches you can bring to your very next study.
Click here for more TMRE 2026 registration information and the show agenda.
Thinking Outside the Box
The methodology suggestions from Quirkos may not be appropriate for every research project or initiative. But then again, that may be the point, as these specific qualitative methods might help with diversity or inclusivity issues, specific consumer groups, or other niche studies. As always, it depends a lot on your objectives and what data you are looking to collect.
However, it sometimes pays to think outside the box and expand upon the powers and capabilities of qualitative research. Enhanced interactivity and engagement are key to these useful alternative methods. Other ideas could include immersive, online focus groups, augmented reality experiences, and community-based research. Technology and creativity are emerging in new ways to inject new life in qualitative research.
As FlexMR puts it in its own list, “6 Creative Qualitative Research Methods,” “It isn’t hard to see that creativity in the purest sense is the way forward for qualitative and market research—the more creative the research experience is, the more engaged participants will likely be during the research project, and the more stakeholders stand to gain in terms of truly actionable insights and customer connections.”
Video: “8 Innovative Qualitative Research Methods You Need to Know,” courtesy of Daily Qualitative Research Tips.
