Qualitative Consumer and Marketing Research
- Russell Belk - York University, Canada
- Eileen Fischer - York University, Canada
- Robert V Kozinets - University of Southern California, USA
- How is qualitative marketing and consumer research conducted today?
- What is rigorous research in this field?
- What are the new, cutting edge techniques?
Written for students, scholars, and marketing research practitioners by three qualitative marketing research pioneers, this book takes readers through the basics to an advanced understanding of the state of the art in qualitative marketing and consumer research. The book offers readers a practical guide to planning, conducting, analyzing, and writing-up research or editing multi-media presentations using both time-tested and new methods, skills, and technologies. With hands-on exercises that researchers can practice and apply, the book leads readers step-by-step through developing qualitative researching skills in creative data collection, analysis, and presentation, using illustrations drawn from the best of recent and classic research.
Whatever your background, this book will help you become a better researcher and help your research come alive for others.
Useful at an introductory level and contains contemporary examples.
The book is excellent and very much needed. It will be used and a supplement to the classes. Students will opt to buy it or not.
I really find this book an inspirational piece of work! As I see it, it fits best for those who are doing their doctoral studies, or even post docs. However, the data gathering methods, as well as sections dealing with analysis are suitable also for undergraduates. Furthermore, I considered the tips in research formulation and publishing very helpful.
I am delighted by recent publications of books that serve as indispensable guidline for students and researchers to conduct solid research at undergraduade and postgraduate level. it appears that students in their final year projects prefer quantative approaches in an attempt to keep the research design simple and straight forward. Therefore, Belk's advocacy for qualitative studies in marketing research is most welcome and may help encourage students to espouse this approach.
As a marketing professor and PhD advisor, I found my students were quite often “torn” between the two research approaches – qualitative and quantitative. Coming from an Eastern European country, Romania, striving to get more visibility, I felt even more the need to find that equilibrium between these two types of researches and researchers, at the same time. Not to mention that some research methods – as ethnographic interviews and netnography – are sometimes disregarded by marketers. Reading the book, one can found important answers for important questions:
- why qualitative and quantitative research methods are complements in understanding real world
- why people need to learn doing good qualitative research, since being contextualized shouldn’t mean less accurate and reliable results, and since qualitative research is not at all “easier” or “less scientific” than quantitative research
- why how qualitative research results could and should be published in top journals.
I’ve been looking for such a book for a long time: a book that places qualitative marketing research where it belongs, in industry and the academe. A book that sets things in order, clearly organizing them from an epistemological point of view. A book that opens doors to further readings and new insights, that tells you where else to look, but not necessarily how to do it or what you have to see; a book that encourages people to find out more and become better at doing good qualitative research in order to find answers for relevant research questions.
This book has clear potential to become a new standard in qualitative consumer research.
Sage College Publishing
