Qualitative research is used to gain insight into people's attitudes, behaviours, value systems, concerns, motivations, aspirations, culture or lifestyles. These past two weeks we've had assignments on doing different types of qualitative research to see what students on this campus like, such as sports teams and some of their habits, such as which door they use the most when entering the School of Communications. It's small oberservational experienments like these that are able to utalize qualitative research and get results without having to intrude on the people who are being observed.
Another type of qualitative research that is often used in the industry would be focus groups. I know that recently one of the Public Relations classes had to hold a focus group about the School of Communications. I thought it would be interesting to do a focus group with some current juniors and talk about the new York Hill campus. To get some ideas on how to run this focus group I used the Free Management Library's basis of conducting a focus group. I put together some questions to ask, or bring up in discussion such as what students think of the current shuttle system from York Hill to Mount Carmel, what their thoughts are on the fact that there is currently no staff at the health services at York Hill, and how much they utalize the cafe at Rocky Top. My focus group consisted of ten juniors living at York Hill and provided me with a great deal of feedback. In the aspect of crisis management, these are crisis situations for many students here at York Hill.
Some of the feedback was that the shuttles are too unreliable for them to use. "I have to leave at least a half hour before class to get there on time," one participant commented, and all agreed. The general consensus was that many students drive opposed to taking the shuttle because they know they will get to class on time and it's less of a hassle. In the area of health services, all of the participants were disturbed by the fact that it was not staffed, but wasn't one of their main concerns. One of the participants is a RA and explained how many of his residents have been sent to the hospital because of the lack of nurses up here. This comment did in fact spark the level of concern in the other participants. The last topic, regarding the cafe, through these ten students showed that it is not utalized as much as it should be. Their comments had a lot to do with they were unaware of what the hours are, and theres never a lot of food options when they do go. Hopefully, this will change as the year goes on, but there was a lot of helpful feedback from the participants. Although this was only a group of ten students, there can be other focus groups done to get more opinions on the York Hill campus. I'm sure focus groups like the one I conducted would be benefical to not only other students, like myself being involved in SGA, but also administration for their future campus expansions.
Qualitative research is something that I feel is very necessary to the PR industry to get feedback on people's feelings and attitudes. Quantitative research provides people with numbers to back up these feeings, but what do the numbers really mean if there's no attitudes and feelings described as well? It's the people, in these focus groups, in these observations that help make different methods and theories, and are very much needed in this industry. Even in something as simple as a focus group for getting feedback on York Hill is helpful and is something I'll probably do again.
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