Goodbye to Stereotypes – Designing Research That is Effective, Fair and Empowering

Research can play a powerful role in giving lesser-heard groups a platform to represent themselves giving significant benefits for research buyers and enabling commercial and public organizations to better serve minority groups. Significant Insight’s columnist, friend and team member, Sania Haq, has launched an important new training course through the Market Research Society (MRS).  

Over at Significant Insights, a course like this is why we get up in the morning so I thought I’d have a very quick chat with Sania to find out more!

Hi Sania, always great to catch up. You’ve been busy! Tell all, what is your new course all about and why is it important?

My training session will help you address biases and blind spots, along with offering guidance on research design that will enable you to achieve valid and effective results.

Too often, we do not have a holistic understanding of minority groups, due to factors such as lack of interaction, representation in media or visibility in prominent positions within culture and society. This can lead to misunderstandings and, sadly, the perpetuation of restrictive, and often harmful, stereotypes. 

Research can play a powerful role in giving lesser-heard groups a platform to represent themselves. This also has significant benefits for research buyers, enabling commercial and public organizations to better serve minority groups. 

Sadly, however, the potential of research is often untapped.

There are a number of reasons for this which the course will look at in detail, including challenges in accessing minority audiences through traditional research recruitment approaches; audiences may, understandably, be less familiar or comfortable with research; potentially needing to employ a range of data collection methods and practices to ensure the research is inclusive and therefore representative (e.g. translations, ethnic matching, online and offline options). 

There is no one size fits all approach for researching minority groups, plus there will always be things we don’t know we don’t know.

The course’s aim is therefore to equip researchers with a broad approach, along with knowledge, tips and inspiration to help them better navigate the process.