Home>>Case Studies>>Capturing the "unsaid"!
Backdrop…
Enough stress cannot be laid on the importance of capturing the non verbal aspects of an individual’s response by tracking and understanding his body language, eye- movement, changes in heart rate/ pulse etc. Many a times a co-moderator who is a trained observer is involved in quali sessions purely to note these aspects of the responses that may be too valuable to risk losing out on. These non- verbalized nuggets of information become even more vital when the respondent is not articulate enough due to constraints like language fluency, age etc. or in cases where he/ she is more likely to put a false façade or be more defensive because of the nature of the subject being handled.
The case here also was one, where the target group was small children whose reactions to a few episodes of a popular TV series were to be ascertained.
Task at hand…
The client wanted us to expose a few episodes that had been developed for the new season of a popular kids’ TV series and evaluate it on key parameters like appeal or interest generated, comprehension, elements liked/ disliked etc both at an absolute level as well as relative to a popular competing kids TV series.
Our approach…
From our understanding of the brief and the TG involved, we were quite certain that in this case we would need to rely a whole lot on the non verbal responses as children in the targeted age group are rarely able to verbalize their thoughts and emotions with regard to a subject. Also the other element that we would need to take care of was to simulate as closely as possible the usual environment in which the consumption of such programs takes place by children with all the other distractions etc. in place and not put them in a spot which might intimidate them.
So we decided to use the ‘eyes on screen’ methodology by showing the program to sets of 2 children at a time, who were observed by one trained observer post which each child was interviewed individually.
The notion supporting this methodology was that the insights that we would gather by tracking the child’s immersion in the program, equivalent to his focus on the screen at various points, would be far higher than those that would be obtained by only questioning him.
The environment created for this exercise was kept as natural and friendly as possible and interesting snacks and beverages were also made available; in order to observe whether the child is engrossed enough to even ignore his favorite snacks and if so at what points of the program such levels of interest are generated.
The order of exposure of the various programs (ours as well as competition’s) was also rotated to rule out any influence of this extraneous factor.
The facial expressions of the child, his body language, his eye ball movement… all were keenly observed.
The questionnaire employed for the interviews was also kept extremely child friendly using simplistic everyday language without any overload of jargon. A child’s short attention span was also considered in deciding the length and flow of the questionnaire. The focus being on checking the key observations made while the programs were being viewed in an uncomplicated but indirect manner.
The outcome…
The synthesis of the verbal and non verbal responses enabled us to provide the client with some extremely valid and actionable insights with regard to the various facets of the program content.
Our detailed analysis also enabled us to suggest areas of improvement that went beyond only the episodes in question and gave the client an unbiased, informed perspective on the desirables in a program targeted at children that age, in the Indian context, which they found highly useful.
This allowed them to fine tune the programs, incorporating most of our recommendations, which worked no less than magical for them as indicated in the recall and various ratings for this series post our research.
Highlights…
