Ross McLean’s Post

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Insight Industry Expert | Mobile App Designer & Developer | Generative AI | Mobile Qualitative Research Pioneer | Successful Tech Platform Founder

4 Reasons it’s Crucial that Qualitative Researchers Pay Attention to GenerativeAI: 1. GenAI’s effect on qualitative research will be profound. Up until now, technology has struggled to provide qualitative researchers with useful analysis tools. GenerativeAI will change that. One of qualitative research’s greatest challenges is taking the massive amounts of unstructured data we collect and actually having enough time to have a smart human parse it for what’s important and insightful. One of the things that GenAI is fundamentally good at is helping extract meaning from massive amounts of unstructured data. The more I learn about GenAI and the more I experiment with it in the qual research space, the more confident I become that GenAI will change qual profoundly. 2. GenAI will allow qualitative research to retain/regain relevance by allowing it to deliver more powerful insight faster. This will ultimately benefit the qual research business by bringing qualitative back into an increasingly high-paced innovation and product development cycle from which it is currently being dropped or excluded because it takes too long. 3. Qual researchers have a huge amount to gain by having a basic understanding of GenAI. We need to know what it can and can’t do, and how to apply it. AI can’t replace a human who’s great at qualitative, but it can make it much faster for you to deliver better work to your clients. 4. If quallies get on board and contribute, we’ll get powerful Generative AI tools. If not, tech will do it. Poorly. If the development of AI for qualitative research is influenced by quallies, we will end up with powerful AI tools that truly help us do our jobs. If we delay/resist, technology experts will build GenAI for qualitative without truly understanding what qual researchers actually need from it.

William Landell Mills

Semiotic and Qual Practitioner

1mo

Hi Ross, I can see that AI will help speed up content analysis. But that was never the hard part of qual. The hard part is in unlocking the deeper meanings at work. What people say in qual can be smart, idiotic, true, dishonest, pertinent, random etc. It is always the product of endless biases, not least of which being ego defense. And that's why when we were learning qual together we were taught to question what consumers said, never to take it at face value, but to see it as evidence of a wider and more complex reality, that it was our job to piece together. I worry that Ai summaries offer the convincing simulation of insight but not the substance; that the Ai outputs become 'the text', not just a perspective on the text. I know this is not the intention. But there is an economic and intellectual impetus towards industrialized qual. And in pursing Ai, without the vivid awareness of how flawed a qual transcript is as 'data', the space between qual (where what people say is just part of a jigsaw) and quant (where numerical data is treated as fact) is lost. The other risk is that people (like you and me) who were trained to be curious about what people meant, not just report on what they said, won't be trained in the future.

Alex Menocal

Just a mass of personal charm

1mo

Fine but what does Gen AI think?

Burr Gavin

Program Director, Customer Relations Insights at Northwestern Medicine

1mo

Imagine taking 15 consumer interview transcriptions dumping them into AI to glean the learning. It might spit out 10-12 'insights', of which 2-3 are gold dust, which is all you need.

This reminds me of your “Dude, Where’s my Jetpack?” presentation. Very timely perspective. 

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