There is a routine overemphasis in qualitative market research on screening out respondents who are not considered “representative” of the target customer type.

In pharmaceutical market research, for instance, it has been established practice for screeners to disqualify consumer / patient respondents who are personally in, or have a relative in, a medical or marketing field.  

This practice relates to a somewhat misguided focus on eliminating all “bias” in market research—screening out anything that might somehow contaminate the purity or authenticity of the study findings.  It is also based in a quantitative market research concept—a statistical premise—that is not entirely relevant to the qualitatiive market research mandate.

However, I believe that consumers who have family members in medical fields, or even individuals who are in medical fields themselves, will often have richer insights on the study topics that outweigh concerns with bias or representativeness of their perspectives and experiences.

For example, why not include a nurse who is taking a GLP-1 as a patient in a qualitative patient-focused GLP-1 study?   

Not only will the nurse reflect on patterns from their recurrent interactions with patients on this topic, but they also will draw from their own lived experiences as a patient.  

Their blended roles—as a healthcare provider and as a patient—allow then to identify implicit patterns in patient experiences, mindsets, or decision-making that more “representative” patients also think and experience but struggle to recognize and explicate.  They can also recognize and reflect on gaps between patients and healthcare providers that are a tremendous source of strategic value to pharmaceutical brand teams.

In doing so, these “unrepresentative” respondents provide useful nuggets of insight—ideas that integrate and explain social patterns in fresh and meaningful ways.  

Isn’t that—deep insight development—the higher-level goal of qualitative research?

As culture is a broadly shared system of beliefs, these more insightful “unrepresentative” respondents are uncovering patterns in the shared, mainstream, or “representative” world view that the “representative” respondents often miss.  

In cultural anthropology, an early phase of ethnographic fieldwork involves establishing relationships with a few “key informants” within the local social system.  

Key informants are go-to individuals who help the ethnographer navigate the cultural system through the extended fieldwork experience.  Among other things, key informants tend to provide patient explanations in response to the ethnographer’s naïve and incessant questions, dispatch useful backstage information (e.g., gossip) to contextualize community personalities and social conflicts, and connect the ethnographer to local experts on different domains of the social system.  

Good anthropologists cultivate key informant relationships and draw heavily from them throughout their fieldwork.

These key informants are implicit sociologists or anthropologists within their communities.  They intuitively “get,” and vicariously enjoy, the anthropologist’s mandate—that humans exist in different culturally constructed realities and the anthropologist is there to understand and describe the configuration of their particular cultural system.   

In this sense, key informants are unrepresentative outsiders in their communities who have unique insight into the workings of their cultural system.

As anthropologists have learned in their engagements with key informants, market research clients should loosen up their fixation with “representative” respondents because it can be counterproductive to the desired outcome of qualitative research—deep insight development.  

Just as deviants help to uncover implicit social norms, unrepresentative respondents can enlighten researchers and client teams to less evident, but still widely shared, cultural patterns in thought and behavior.

Written by Nicholas Kottak,  PhD

Nicholas Kottak, PhD is the President of Ethnographic Solutions, LLC.

Ethnographic Solutions is a leading ethnographic research company for pharmaceutical firms and healthcare companies.

Ethnographic Solutions offers a unique methodological and analytic approach to physician-patient dialogue research, day in the life patient ethnography, sales representative effectiveness research, and patient journey research.