239) Lost in Translation

One thing about The Plan's whole one-year-commitment is the blog becomes somewhat of a chronological measuring stick. As in, I can mark events in life against how long I've been writing. That being said, it's been a very long time (more than 239 days) since I've been sick. I know because I've never written a Plan post while feeling like crap. Until today.

Pity party aside, I'm a total baby when I get sick. I'm one of those people who doesn't believe in feeling uncomfortable, so I pre-medicate at the first sign of pain. I had a couple social engagements tonight, and the little devil on my shoulder has been trying to convince me to Dayquil up and go. But it's looking and feeling more like a stay in and sleep night. Which brings me to this post, my one true obligation of the night.


(Image from WebMD.)

I've been thinking about alternative research methods lately. Out of the box ways to extract information, opinion, feelings and those buried-deep-down wants we all harbor. There are those who say that as soon as you put someone in a research setting, whatever comes out will be tainted. Someone once told me that focus groups, a long-embraced ad industry favorite, are completely ineffective. Their argument was that the process of translating what's in our head into words that we express to another person (a researcher, no less) in an artificial environment, will always lose something along the way.

Fair enough. "Completely ineffective" may be a bit harsh, but I can appreciate the argument. Given the myriad of outlets that people use to express themselves these days, there has to be better ways to gather this info. My favorite research method these days is mining online public forums such as Facebook, Craigslist, Flickr, Yelp, etc., which I've talked about at length in prior posts. The Internet makes so much of this info readily available - it's just a matter of interpreting it. While you won't find explicit answers to straight forward and pointed questions, you'll get voluntary (and thus, pure) opinions.

But what about other face to face methods of research? Experiential is always a good option (i.e. setting up a soccer tournament to mine info on teens for a soccer cleat company), though there is still the presence of the researcher to contend with. As soon as we know we are being studied, something tweaks within us, and our behavior isn't 100% natural. (I think the same is true for animals at zoos. Somehow, they know they're being watched/studied, and act differently than they would in the wild. No wonder we're continually being astonished by previously unseen animal behavior.)