Qualitative Research and Two of My Classmates

This week’s blog post is to once again comment on two of my classmates blogs.  I have never thought about looking into non-profit public relations before until I started to look at open classes for me to take in the spring.  When looking at Sacha’s blog, I see that the point of her blog is in fact non-profit public relations.  Sacha talks about how nonprofits rely on research in order to help them see who is donating what and why the people are donating to the cause or company.  She was able to find an article that was about nonprofits and how they do research but not for themselves but they really do it for the community so that they can see what is going on.  Sacha sees that nonprofit public relations do not really understand or know how to conduct research and that if they did, it would be able to help them in the long run.

Another classmate that I wanted to comment about was Meagan’s blog which is about qualitative research for the Quinnipiac Women’s Soccer team.  Meagan talks about how she never knew that the women’s soccer team was under observation during one or even most of her games.  She mentions that one of their trainers works for Yale University and that he conducts many different types of observation with the girls.  At first she says, none of us knew we were being studied until he finally told them.  One type of observation that he used was surveying.  He surveyed the girls to see how healthy they were eating and to see if that had any effect on them as they played in their games.  At the end, the whole purpose of his study was to see if by being away of what the girls were eating and doing would improve them as a player. 

Qualitative Research in the NHL

This week’s blog post is about qualitative research.  As we learned in class and through the text book, qualitative research tires to describe things, like meanings, comprehension, and processes.  A qualitative study is often done through personal interviews, in-depth interviews, panels, focus groups, field studies and similar research methods.  When a qualitative research study is being done, people are often asked to respond to general questions that later on, the researcher will formulate those answers into additional questions to get a better understanding of what the person means and to figure out the respondent’s feelings, interpretations and responses.

It wasn’t hard for me to find an article about qualitative research with in the national hockey league.  For those who don’t know, the Ducks formally the Mighty Ducks are from Anaheim California.  A couple of years ago the Mighty Ducks organization did not know if they should keep the Mighty or get rid of it and just be the Ducks.  After Samueli and his wife Susan bought the team, they decided that in years to come there would be some changed made to the team, one being the name.  After interviewing some season ticket holders, as well as a few of the teams players, they decided to take away the “Mighty.”  It was said that everyone was alright with the change of the name because it was not changed completely.  A quote in the article says that qualitative and a formal use of quantitative research was used in this decision. 

Another article that I found has to do with the NHL and Sling Media Inc.  Together, the league and the company have come together where Slingbox owners can record their favorite hockey moments on Slings’ website.  People that have SlingPlayer software are able to share their favorite clips with family and friends.  Even though someone has to have an account in order to view the clips, the company will organize the clips according to the different teams to see who is watching the clips and where they are from.  Also, the NHL will post its own content on the website as well.  The article says that this study will last one summer to see the outcome.  By being on this website, the league is the first one to be on this website and they are excited to give their viewers this service.

These two site’s really show how research is performed in the NHL.  Although, the research conducted was for two different reasons, one can still see that there are ways to conduct research in any area of an organization.

2 Responses to Unobtrusive Research

This week’s blog post is to comment on two of my classmates blogs from last week about unobtrusive research.  It seems to me that people could be using unobtrusive research without even knowing that they are.  This is what Charlie realized once he knew what unobtrusive research was.  In his blog post from last week, Charlie talks about his internship and how he used these types of research on a day to day basis.  Charlie explains that he used historical and legal research as well as content analysis in order to find government representatives that support regenerative medicine and stem cell research.   Mainly he used historical research because he had to look up data that was already processed, analyze it and report to the managers with what he found.

In another one of my classmate’s blogs, unobtrusive research was done at ballparks concession stands.  Andrew found an article that talks about how Sports Illustrated conducted unobtrusive research at all Major League ballparks.  Throughout the country, the article gives specific foods that are most common as well as how much the product is and how many calories the product is.  Actually when reading this article, I thought to myself, “how gross is this? The Northside Twist at a Chicago ball park is 1480 calories!  What are people thinking?”  Now not everything at the ballparks are this fattening but actually seeing how much a pretzel with some sauces is in calories is mind blowing!  As Andrew mentions, unobtrusive research is not always that reliable but it does help out with finding answers in a fast and easy way.

Unobtrusive Research and Hockey

As we talked in class, unobtrusive research is when one performs research without the outcome being affected.  This is an easy way for researchers to observe ever day behavior without having to pay for the research or even having the hassle of interviewing consumers.  Unobtrusive research forces the things being studied to act normal because they do not know someone is intruding in their everyday behavior.  Unobtrusive research often uses secondary research in order to figure out if what they studied actually does occur or even if they just want to get more information about the product. 

When looking through the web I was able to find an article that talks about how West Chester University did a study about players from the Heat, who is currently working with the Philadelphia Flyers.  The article talks about how they studied the core temperatures and sweat rate of the players once they were done on the ice.  The way that they got the idea for this is by looking at what they do for the professional football players.  This is the first time that they are doing this for professional hockey players but when talking about secondary research, they are using what they know about the football players to use towards the hockey players.  If the company did not perform this research first for the football players, than they would have no idea how to do this for the hockey guys.

Without unobtrusive research, we would not know some of the things that we know now.  It is an easy and cheap way to get answers and outcomes that researchers want.  Like I said before unobtrusive research is just another form of secondary research where we can use information that we already know and apply to it what we are observing.