MRS Award for Innovation in Research Methodology 2016
06 October 2016

Four finalists have been announced for the award, now in its 30th year and sponsored by Kantar TNS.

The Award is given for a paper describing a new methodology which adds to the body of research knowledge and significantly contributes to the way research is both thought about and carried out. Papers must be in the public domain and this year all four come from the IJMR.

In True lies and true implicit: how priming reveals the hidden truth, David Penn explains how response latency and semantic priming were harnessed to create a truly implicit methodology that taps in to automatic processes. For eBay, the approach he describes revealed a strong (and hidden) negative bias among non-users and showed that these beliefs could be successfully challenged by new ATL advertising.

Chris Barnham’s Quantitative and qualitative research: perceptual foundations, which has also been nominated for the Silver Medal, aims to uncover the assumptions implicit in our contrasting of qualitative and quantitative methods and identify how they are rooted in our underlying preconceptions about the perceptual process itself. He outlines a new platform upon which the distinction between the two can be established and which links the latter with semiotics.

There has been an increasing realisation that qualitative methods, emphasising data richness and a deep understanding of consumers, are a critical component of research in emerging markets. In researching emerging markets, anthropology often trumps statistics, authored by Christopher Hylton Fitzroy Nailer, Bruce William Stening and Marina Yue Zhang, argues that a thorough understanding of emerging markets requires a set of skills akin to those of an anthropologist, and sets out how these can be acquired.

Finally, Hervé Guyon and Jean-François Petiot’s paper New conjoint approaches to scaling brand equity and optimising share of preference prediction proposes two new approaches to scale customer-based brand equity using repeated measures and structural equation modeling and to estimate the share of preferences on the basis of a randomised first choice.

The winner will be announced at the MRS Awards 2016 in London on 5 December.