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Viewpoint: The commercial–academic divide: never the twain shall meet? Sheila Keegan I have been a commercial qualitative researcher for many years, several of them as an AQR committee member. I am also a Chartered Psychologist and currently on the committee of the Qualitative Methods in Psychology (QMiP) section of the British Psychological Society (BPS). Given that both associations have been set up to promote qualitative research and qualitative researchers, you might be forgiven for assuming that they are similar in outlook and interests. Not a bit of it. The commercial and academic qualitative research worlds are so far apart that they barely speak the same language, and this is reflected in the focus of the two organisations. Before I embarked on a doctoral programme five years ago, I had never read a single book on qualitative research. This did not seem to be a barrier to progression in the commercial research industry. I learnt my trade, like most of my contemporaries, through apprenticeship: ‘learning on Seeing it now from the other side, I am equally shocked at the apologetic, methodologically focused, uninspired approach of much academic qualitative research. On several occasions, as a speaker at BPS events, I have been approached by university lecturers whose job it is to teach qualitative research, but who are completely unaware that the commercial qualitative industry even exists. Qual, at least within the field of psychology, is still having to justify itself. There are ‘qual’ vs ‘quant’ debates going on the like of which commercial research has not seen for decades. There is a dearth of supervisors for student qual projects (Maddill et al. 2005), and little qualitative research is published in leading psychology journals (Cassell et al. 2006). How is it possible that academic and commercial practice are so different, when we apparently work in the same arena? In the 1950s and early 1960s, the time of Dr Ernest Dichter and, later, Bill Schlackman, ‘motivational research’, as it was then termed, was closely linked to psychoanalytical theory. With the birth of marketing and a new pragmatism, the renamed ‘qualitative research’ focused more on ‘the data’; it became closely aligned with ‘business’. Meanwhile the academics evolved in a different direction, the scientific paradigm prevailed and qualitative research was treated with much suspicion – and continued to be viewed in this way until quite recently. As a result, commercial qualitative research has seen exponential growth in the last half century, whilst academic qualitative research has languished and is still dragging itself up by its bootstraps, lacking the confidence to throw in the scientific towel and establish itself on its own terms. Why does this matter? Can’t we both jog along in our own sweet ways? Academics think that commercial researchers are insubstantial: intellectually deficient and lacking in scientific rigour – that they would sell their grannies at the drop of a hat. Commercial researchers think academics are incomprehensible, boring, obsessed with the minutiae, take five years to finish a four-group project and have not an ounce of creativity. In different ways each is intimidated by the other. They have about as much chance of mating as Paris Hilton and Terry Wogan. But, in spite of the obvious differences, I think there are very good reasons why academics and commercial practitioners should get out together more. Academics need to grasp that the point of research is not the research. It is how it helps you to understand the world – or whatever bit of the world you are concerned with – more clearly and that, in turn, helps you to plan the future. The Qualitative Methods in Psychology section, even by its very name, tells you where its interest lies. When I go to QMiP meetings, people ask me, ‘What method do you use?’ Conversation circles around the relative benefits of qualitative methods and I want to shout, ‘What on earth does it matter? Use the methods that might give you an answer.’ Commercial researchers could teach academics a thing or two about focusing on the end game, about efficient and effective research, about research as an intrinsically creative process, about presentation as engaging storytelling. But commercial researchers are equally smug – though I believe this is changing. We pride ourselves on doing what ‘works’, and dismiss theory as obtuse and time wasting. Why do we need to develop an epistemological understanding of qualitative practice when we know from experience and intuition what works best and when are clients are happy with what we do? David Smith presents a good argument for why we should pay more attention to theory. He points out the ways in which expectations of research are changing and how this is challenging our notions of quality. He proposes a new ‘quality paradigm’ and a Charter of Good Practice (Smith 2006). Increasingly, commercial practice is moving into areas where research is less circumscribed; we have ethnographic immersion, we have research participants as facilitators, self-managed focus groups, and so on. Without a strong theoretical understanding of what we are doing and why we are doing it, we risk undermining the authority of research. We risk being accused of charlatanism, of being more concerned with performance than content. Academics could teach commercial researchers a lot about reflectivity and reflexivity, about questioning our own assumptions, about understanding the theoretical perspective we are researching from and the implications of this perspective for our work. They could help us to credibly support our move into a more fluid notion of research and to understand why this, more than ever, demands rigour and discipline in our thinking and practice. Academics and commercial practitioners need each other – they just don’t realise it yet. We have a technique we sometimes use in creative workshops, called ‘forced coupling’. Participants have to take two objects, say a shoe and a cream cake, examine the attributes of each and create a hypothetical object that could be created by the marriage of the two. Perhaps it is time to lock six academics and half a dozen commercial practitioners in a room with no toys for a week and see what happens? References Sheila Keegan is a director of Campbell Keegan Ltd and has been a qualitative research consultant for over 20 years. International Journal of Market Research 49(1), 2007
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