It's easy to want to fill an awkward silence. Often, however, a pause in conversation is time people need to think. When conducting research, and maybe just in normal conversations, try to trust the questions that you ask and avoid filling the silence after asking a question. Just wait and listen.

My experience is that it's very easy to follow a nice open-ended question such as "How do you feel about it now?" with all sorts of qualifications or assumptions because a silence feels uncomfortable. It can quickly become, "How do you feel about it now?...I guess it must have been hard for you, right?" And instead of giving someone space to share a thoughtful answer of your open-ended question all you might get is a "Yes" and perhaps your chance of finding out what they really thought has gone. Instead, have faith in what you ask and stick out the silence.

Also see: prefer open-ended questions, some social research tips

Don't fill the silence

I hadn’t given much thought to hope, beyond it being a nice feeling to have, until I heard of CR Snyder’s cognitive model for hope which shed a new light on it for me. He proposed a model of hope where (paraphrasing) an individual may be hopeful if they have:

Goals they desire. If you don’t or can’t picture any future state you’d like then you won’t have a lot of hope.

Pathways. You need to see some ways that you may make step-by-step progress towards a goal.

Willpower or agency. You need to be motivated and believe that you have the ability to succeed at your goal.

With all of these you can imagine feeling hopeful. Without any one of them and you probably won’t so much.

The mountain is the Ogre, a wholly impossible looking peak scaled by Doug Scott and others for which I would have had zero hope to climb (no pathways, no willpower) and yet they remarkably did.

HT once again to Brené Brown in Dare to Lead.

Hope

Pitched as the one number you need to grow your business, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a way to find out from your customers how many love what you’re doing enough to tell their friends vs how many are ambivalent or negative about your business. The resulting number, your NPS, ranging from +100 to -100 has been shown to be an indicator of companies’ future success.

To calculate your NPS ask your customers how likely they would be to recommend your business to a friend—or variations thereof—and give them a scale of 0 (not likely) to 10 (very likely) to answer with. Those who answer 9 or 10 are your biggest fans or Promoters. Those who answer 7 or 8 are passively satisfied—they like your business but are unlikely to shout about it. And those answering 6 or below are your Detractors. If they talk about your business it could well be negative. Your NPS is your % of Promoters minus the % of your Detractors. For example, if you received 100 responses, 35 as 9s or 10s, 37 as 7s and 8s, and 28 as 0–6s then your NPS would be 35 minus 28 = 7.

Keep track of your NPS over time and you’ll get a sense of how your business is doing. Follow up with qualitative feedback, for instance, “Why did you give this rating?”, and get a recipe for improving your business. Simple.

Learn more in the original Harvard Business Review article, “The One Number You Need to Grow” by Frederick F. Reichheld.

Net Promoter Score

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is an amazingly simple way to uncover if and how strong your implicit biases may be. For example, you could test if you have a bias on gender roles (as in the sketch), race, religion or in fact any attitudes you may have. You could forget about reading this and simply go take the Implicit Association Test online now and you’ll get the idea and perhaps surprise yourself.

In the example I gave in the sketch, you could see how strong your biases are for traditional gender roles by measuring the difference in time it takes to sort first career words towards men and home and family words towards women, and then sorting the other way around.

It’s fascinating, and a little uncomfortable, to see your implicit attitudes so clearly come to light. Don’t forget to try taking a test.

The Implicit Association Test

The effect effect is the undoubted extra stickiness and shareability of an idea by calling it an effect.

There’s something about summing up a piece of research or an observation with the name effect that makes it a whole lot easier to communicate and remember.

The more solar panels installed in a neighbourhood the greater chance of a growth of solar panels in that neighbourhood

And, for those of you wondering why it’s not the affect affect, here's a sketch explaining when to use affect vs effect

Perhaps because of the effect effect, I've covered a lot of effects already in sketches (though there are many more to do). See all "effect" sketches

The Effect Effect

Mean world syndrome is the name given to the observation that people who watch more TV seem to believe the world is a more dangerous place than people who watch less.

It's likely due to the prevalence of violence on TV and coverage of extreme events that are actually quite rare in most people’s lives.

The term comes from cultivation theory — broadly the study of the long-term effects of television — which has a more general idea that people who watch a lot of TV tend to see reality more like the reality they see on TV.

Mean world syndrome

Moon pools are protected entrances to water that can even give the remarkable ability to enter from under the water.

First created to support drilling operations on offshore platforms, moon pools can include entrances on the decks or undersides of ships or an entry and exit for divers from permanent underwater research bases.

For underwater entrances, also known as wet porches, the trick is to pressurize the air around the pool to the same pressure as the surrounding water. The raised pressure keeps the water from gushing in and enables a swimming pool-like entrance even though you’re already below the surface.

I've never used one, but I'd absolutely love to. One of my earliest memories of a moon pool and corresponding bafflement and wonder was in James Cameron's 1989 film The Abyss. A moon pool features in the recent trailer for the remastered version of The Abyss

Moon pool

Tricky topics - validity trickier than reliability. At it’s core I believe reliability is about getting the same results given the same conditions and validity is about measuring what you intend to measure. Harder than it sounds.

Understanding reliability and validity

Maslow’s is interesting, but not terribly helpful if you want to use it for something. This one however, I still find a very useful framework when designing (read about it in the DMI paper System Logics). Your sweet spots for the exciting innovations are the context and activity level needs. 

Patnaik’s Hierarchy of Needs

The basic idea goes that you have to satisfy those at the bottom before the top: if you’re freezing cold and hungry, you’re not giving much thought to the joy mastering new skills. Not terribly robust. But interesting and somewhat clarifying.

See updated sketchplanation of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs

Thanks to Jump Associates and Peter Lyman.

Perform good social research

What a child can do in cooperation today, he can do alone tomorrow.
— Lev Vygotsky

Based on visualizing Lev Vygotsky’s theory.

Zone of proximal development

This helpful framework is an enhancement of regular adoption theory with the different approaches to design for each stage. Canada, Mortensen, Patnaik, 2007 (pdf). Some great examples of each stage in the paper.

Designing for adoption

Three principles for spending your money to make you happier from the excellent titled paper "If money doesn’t make you happy then you probably aren’t spending it right."

Buy many small pleasures instead of a few big ones.

If I feel like I have money and I'm not feeling so happy, the tips from this paper come to mind, and I find myself reflecting on what I could be doing differently with my money.

More generally, I believe there is a correlation between money and happiness, but only up to a certain level, at which point most of our needs are met, and more money doesn't tend to make people that much happier.

Elizabeth W. Dunn, Daniel T. Gilbert, Timothy D. Wilson, If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Volume 21, Issue 2, 2011, Pages 115-125, ISSN 1057-7408, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcps.2011.02.002

Spend better

PhD metaphors: a journey, product and quilt

Advice indirectly from Nigella Lawson in her husband Charles Saatchi’s book.

Also, a pretty direct reading from How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Better to be interested than try to be interesting

Great practice for research. Good practice for life too.

Research sketches