How to conduct qualitative research: a step-by-step guide and examples

Qualitative research is the first step towards fulfilling your customers' needs, increasing customer satisfaction, and driving brand loyalty.

How? Qualitative research explores the “why” behind customer actions, preferences, and emotions. Like a good conversation, you can dig into customer reasoning—uncovering valuable information that isn’t available through quantitative research alone.

Our guide will walk you through conducting your own qualitative research in five easy steps to get to the heart of what your customers want. 

Qualitative research is descriptive data used to investigate people’s opinions and motivations, providing valuable insight into their behavior. The data collected in qualitative studies explains why people feel the way they do and is helpful for brand tracking, event planning, and product development. 

Qualitative research is the opposite of quantitative research, which collects and analyzes data that can be measured numerically. It complements quantitative research by providing deeper insights than numbers alone. You can also think of it as hard versus soft or social sciences.

Qualitative research can be conducted as a standalone study or used in a mixed-method study that gathers qualitative and quantitative data. Typically, qualitative research relies on interviews, focus groups, observation, and surveys with open-ended questions inviting written responses to gain deeper insights.

Your qualitative research methodology needs to be uniquely suited to your goals, but there are a few standardized steps to the process. These steps serve as guidelines to develop your unique approach. 

To define a clear research objective, consider SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) goal-setting and what you want to accomplish in the study.

Perhaps you want to do primary research to answer specific business questions. Or you’re doing exploratory research to understand an issue better. The clearer you are about what you want to accomplish, the better able you’ll be to follow the rest of the steps outlined here.

Some examples of qualitative research questions include:

Related: Setting a goal for your survey

A hypothesis is a statement that guides a qualitative research study. It uses your research goal to form an expectation about what the data will reveal. Researchers form a hypothesis as a north star to help them stay on track.

For example, let’s say a product marketer wants to understand the biggest factors impacting whether a consumer purchases their new product. To form a hypothesis, the researcher would consider the goal of the study and make a tentative statement. 

In this example, the hypothesis might be, “Product packaging and branding are the two biggest draws to our new product.”

Let’s use craft beer market researchers for a second example. Craft beer market researchers might form a hypothesis that "Millennial craft beer consumers prefer beer with unique flavor profiles, such as fruit-infused or sour varieties, due to their desire for novelty and differentiation.” 

This hypothesis could guide exploration, like focus groups with millennials on flavor preferences or surveys on why people choose specific craft beers.

The next step is to create a qualitative research plan to structure your market research study. Researchers can effectively address their hypothesis with effective research design. There are several types of research design to consider for your qualitative research plan. 

Here’s a quick rundown on research design types:

In addition to research design, you must consider the type of research. Typically, researchers use one of four different approaches in qualitative data collection. Before brainstorming effective research questions, you must decide on the best method.

Several qualitative research methods have distinct benefits that can support your research goals. Here, we cover 7 qualitative research methods to direct your research.

What it is: Interviews are a traditional qualitative research method frequently used in market research and polling. In an interview, a qualitative researcher has a one-on-one conversation with a consumer.

Benefits:

When to use: Use interviews to explore consumer’s personal experiences, motivations, or emotions.

What it is: Focus groups are conducted with a small group of people selected based on specific demographics. A trained facilitator guides a conversation to collect in-depth information about consumer opinions.

Benefits:

When to use: Use focus groups to understand the nuances of a topic and get consumers' first impressions of a new product or idea.

What it is: Ethnography is a form of qualitative research in which researchers deeply immerse themselves in a specific group or community's natural settings. The qualitative researcher observes people’s behaviors to understand the group’s motivations and beliefs.

Benefits:

When to use: The primary use of ethnography is to understand the nuances of a culture by observing daily life.

What it is: A case study analyzes a specific group, person, or situation to prove a predetermined thesis or principle. Researchers critically examine a subject to recommend a solution. 

Benefits: Case studies strengthen a company’s value proposition in marketing

When to use: It is often used to solve problems, identify important relationships, and develop hypotheses. Case studies are also used in marketing to demonstrate the effectiveness of a product or service.

What it is: Observational research involves observing consumers in their natural environment.

Benefits:

When to use: Use observational research to observe behaviors that might not be easily recalled in an interview. For example, researchers may observe how long consumers take to decide on a product when shopping in their store.

What it is: In content analysis, a researcher evaluates qualitative data, such as text, videos, and images, to identify patterns or themes. The researcher counts the occurrence of certain words, phrases, or concepts within the qualitative data.

Benefits: Content analysis is a lower-cost research method than others like focus groups

When to use: Researchers use content analysis to understand the underlying messages or themes by quantifying the presence of specific elements.  

What it is: In discourse analysis, a researcher analyzes conversations to examine how language is used in different social contexts. Researchers analyze conversations, interviews, and documents to see how language forms social identities and impacts actions.

Benefits: Helps you analyze text and conversations in their context

When to use: Discourse analysis is particularly useful in understanding different power dynamics, cultures, and societal norms for specific demographics. 

Sometimes, researchers don’t want to conduct only qualitative research. They may want to support their efforts with different types of quantitative research to get a broader perspective. Combining qualitative and quantitative methods can help you make detailed descriptions with statistical analysis that backs it up.

Once you’ve determined what you want to do, the hypothesis you want to test, and how you will do so, it’s time to do the research. To gather qualitative data effectively, be sure to choose the best data collection method for your specific objectives.

After weighing your research method options, you might choose to survey your target audience. Online surveys are the most cost-effective, as they can be sent via email, embedded in websites, or shared on social media. When creating questions for qualitative surveys, focus on open-ended questions that allow respondents to answer freely. Don’t limit responses to predefined options.

SurveyMonkey streamlines the data collection process to help you quickly gather and analyze qualitative data. 

“With SurveyMonkey, we can easily look at trends and graph that information,” says Bill Wilson Center Division Director Laura Foster.

“I really appreciate all the different ways that I can filter results and look at the aggregate data. And we’re always asking open-ended questions to get open feedback from people; SurveyMonkey makes it easy to identify themes within that qualitative data.”

Related: Bill Wilson Center uses data to enhance community services

If conducting interviews or focus groups, write down open-ended questions that encourage participants to share descriptive insights. If you decide on observational research, prepare criteria for your observations to ensure consistency.

Next, you will need to recruit participants that fit your research objectives. When choosing participants, be sure to gain informed consent by explaining the purpose of the research and how the data will be used. 

Especially if conducting interviews or focus groups, you should create a comfortable environment for participants. You should also assure participants there are no right answers and that they should reply candidly. 

The beauty of qualitative research is that it provides researchers with significant flexibility. While using a set of pre-defined questions for participants, stay open to exploring topics that come up in conversation. If using surveys as your qualitative research method, monitor responses to ensure completeness and follow up with respondents if clarification is needed. 

After collecting qualitative data, analyze it to see if it supports your hypothesis. Immerse yourself in the data by reading transcripts or field notes, reviewing survey responses, or listening to recordings. Once familiar with the data available, highlight observations in your datasets for further investigation. In addition, document analysis for later reporting.

Coding, or categorizing emerging trends in a dataset, is one popular qualitative data analysis technique. In coding, you organize the unstructured data using labels for recurring ideas, words, phrases, themes, etc. By separating the data into meaningful categories, you can gain valuable insights.

You can also determine overarching insights about a sample by grouping similar responses. This is called thematic analysis, which researchers use to identify, interpret, and understand participant perspectives. 

Keep in mind that thematic analysis is an iterative process. As you engage in qualitative data analysis, you might see specific themes surface consistently. Once you identify those themes as relevant and meaningful, you might restart the analysis process and review the data again, looking for fresh insights into those themes. 

In the end, you’ll need to summarize your findings and connect them to your hypothesis. When presenting your findings, remember to:

Use these five simple steps to conduct qualitative research and understand your target market better.  

There are four main types of qualitative research commonly used for consumer research. Each qualitative research type offers different benefits for researchers. Let’s review the types to determine the most relevant to your research. 

This form of qualitative research aims to understand the shared essence of a phenomenon or human experience. In simpler terms, phenomenological research studies universal lived experiences to understand how a group thinks. Researchers want to uncover what an experience means to a group of people.

Phenomenological research asks, “What is it like to experience ______?” It is used to understand diverse viewpoints. 

In grounded theory, a researcher collects data and analyzes it to develop theories from patterns that emerge. This form of research uses an inductive approach where theories arise from collected data, not the other way around. It is an iterative process where analysis and data collection occur in tandem. 

Researchers use grounded theory to uncover social processes or the dynamics and behaviors of a group. 

Ethnographic research explores the natural behaviors, culture, and traditions of a group of people. It takes observational research one step further by having the researcher live among the subjects in their natural setting. In ethnographic research, researchers can gather in-depth insights by experiencing people’s everyday lives firsthand.  

Ethnographic research helps researchers deeply understand people’s attitudes and behaviors.

Historical research uses primary sources such as documents, letters, and diaries to study past events. Researchers gather information from these primary sources and interpret it using historical context to understand current events. This form of research helps research teams make predictions about future events. In historical research, teams analyze data to identify common themes and patterns.

Historical research digs into old data to understand important events, people, and cultures from the past.

These are the four main types of qualitative research. However, there are other options as well, including narrative research. Finding the appropriate research method will ensure your findings align with your market research goals.

Qualitative research is designed to give researchers a clear understanding of the unique perspectives, opinions, behaviors, and experiences of a certain group. It is unquantifiable and focuses on gathering descriptive feedback from subjects through interviews, focus groups, surveys, etc. 

The qualitative research method garners primary research data. But, before making your final report, consider adding secondary research as well. Integrating your original research data with existing qualitative methods can deepen the story your results tell.

Quantitative research is measurable numerically and uses closed-ended questions to gather data from a sample group. Quantitative research methods test hypotheses about a sample population. Numerical data is collected through surveys with close-ended questions, experiments, polls, and tests. 

Related: Qualitative vs. quantitative research: differences, examples, and when to use each method

Wondering about the pros and cons of choosing qualitative research methods for your study? There are two sides to every coin, and we will look at the positive and negative aspects of this type of research.   

As with any form of research, you must evaluate your goals and determine whether qualitative research methods will meet your needs. While it may present some challenges, qualitative research is a highly effective method of learning about consumer behavior.  

By following the qualitative research steps in this article, you gain the data you need to develop a product, plan an event, or improve your customer experience. Remember to clarify your objectives, form a hypothesis, choose the best method for your needs, analyze the data, and report your findings.    

When it comes to qualitative research, surveys remain a powerful way to collect valuable feedback at scale. SurveyMonkey enables a seamless qualitative research process to get the usage and attitude insight you need. 

Ready to run your own research? Choose from hundreds of expert-written survey templates and open-ended questions designed to get you reliable results. Create online forms to start collecting consumer feedback today.