Q board interviews: An effective method to research user opinions

Q board interviews: An effective method to research user opinions

Wiegers, T.
De Lange, C.J.M.
Vergeest, J.S.M.

Industrial Design Engineering

Design Engineering

2014-12-31

Q board interviews can be applied as an effective method to get insight in the opinions of participants. Q board interviews form the interviewing part of Q methodology. Q methodology can be used to identify typical sets of opinions. However, in many studies, the research goal is to order opinions and see which ones play the most important roles, instead of identifying groups of people with similar opinions. In such cases, full Q methodology is not required. Yet, the Q board interviewing method has a number of characteristics that are also advantageous in such situations. Therefore, we decided to apply Q board interviews, although our goal was not to do factor analysis. With Q board interviews, participants order pre-formulated statements. Besides, participants are encouraged to provide background information. This enables them to bring in issues that go beyond the fixed set of statements. Because of this combination, Q board interviews stimulate engagement of the participants, without making the interview time consuming. The paper describes how Q board interviews were used by students of the course Social Cohesion Design and how the application of Q board interviews functioned as a preparation for applying Q methodology in the second stage of the course.

research aspects in engineering
human and social aspects
opinion research
Q methodology
social cohesion design
participatory research

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:e523bc7b-6a00-4c0d-9d94-7ad9e878a94b

Delft University of Technology

978-94-6186-177-1

Proceedings of the 10th international symposium on tools and methods of competitive engineering TMCE 2014, Budapest, Hungary, May 19-23, 2014.

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2014 Wiegers, T., De Lange, C.J.M., Vergeest, J.S.M.