Qualitative Research

This week's blog focuses on qualitative research in sports public relations.  Qualitative research is research that is used to gain further insight on behavior and reasons leading to such behaviors.  Examples of qualitative research include focus groups, observations and in-depth interviews with an organization's publics.

In sports public relations, research is very important.  It helps an organizations keep in touch with its publics and learn their feelings and behaviors about the organization.  I found a student paper from Nova Southern University about research between an sports organization and its publics.  In this he states that qualitative research in sports public relations is hard to base information off of because a focus group of 12-15 fans cannot represent the attitudes and behaviors of the hundreds of thousands of fans an organization has.  I agree with this argument because of exactly what was said: you cannot base attitudes and feelings of thousands of people off of 15 people.  I do believe that triangulation (the use of qualitative and quantitative research) is a better way to conduct sports public relations, as in any field of public relations.  For sports public relations, qualitative research can help sports PR professionals by giving them a platform to build research off of.  Through an interview or focus group, PR people are able to see how its publics react to a certain item or idea or their current feelings about an event or story that has occurred.  With this, they can continue to use quantitative research to see if these attitudes and feelings from the focus groups are present in a larger sample.

An example of qualitative research in sports can be seen in a video from an organization “EastLondonLives2012.”  The series of videos on YouTube are focus groups from different sets of publics that will be affected by the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London, England.  These focus groups help researchers to gain insight on the excitement, hesitation, and potential fearfulness of the participants in the focus groups.  Although there were many focus groups conducted, the number of participants cannot compare to London’s population, which is just over 7 million people.

Qualitative research can be used for research in sports public relations, but its cannot be the sole form of research for an organization.  Where sports organizations have such a large fan base, the thoughts and feelings of those who were interviewed, observed, or participated in focus groups cannot create a generalized consensus of feelings and affects of the rest of the organizations publics.