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.

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

It’s named Streisand after Barbara Streisand tried to have an aerial photo of her house removed from a set of California coastline photos intended to document coastal erosion. Views of the photo apparently went from 6 to 420,000.

The Effect Effect

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. Probably 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

I’ve never used one, but I’d love to. They seem a little like magic. Basically, you pressurise the air of an underwater box enough to keep the water from coming in. This enables you to have a kind of swimming pool entrance to water even though you’re already actually underwater. So cool.

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

Buy experiences instead of things. Help others instead of yourself. Buy many small pleasures instead of a few big ones. Drawn directly from the excellently entitled paper:

If money doesn’t make you happy then you probably aren’t spending it right. Dunn, Gilbert, Wilson, 2011.

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.

Sketchplanations tagged with research