Never the twain shall meet?

Darren Pennay is celebrating. Managing director of the Social Research Centre in Melbourne and a Qualified Practising Market Researcher (QPMR), Pennay has just received news that a project close to his heart has been approved: a joint program building bridges between the ivory tower of academia and the cut and thrust of commercial market research.

The joint program is between the Social Research Centre, a commercial firm, and the University of Queensland's Institute for Social Science Research. The aim of the program is to examine the issues common to researchers carrying out survey work.
The new Joint Program for the Advancement of Survey Methodology is opening with two co-funded positions - a professor and a research fellow - to build capacity within Australia for exploring survey research issues such as sampling frames, declining response rates, on-line panels and ‘mobile phone only' respondents. Pennay has been appointed as an adjunct professor at the Institute.

‘Australia doesn't have as strong an academic history in survey methodology,' says Pennay.
‘Our survey expertise is very dispersed across universities and market research organisations. There needs to be much stronger links between the two to ensure that both industries are using best practice survey methodologies.'

AMSRS Fellow David Bednall, who is associate professor of marketing at Deakin University, also believes that academics and market researchers have a lot in common and can benefit from working together.

‘Both academics and market researchers are interested in protecting respondents, making sure they are treated correctly and ensuring that we always have a pool of respondents to draw from,' he says.

Academic researchers and market researchers in industry have different mechanisms for achieving this outcome. All Australian universities have ethics committees with stringent requirements for academic researchers. Market researchers, on the other hand, have the Code of Professional Behaviour.

‘The overarching principle is the same for both - do no harm,' says Pennay.

‘Participants should be no worse off because of participating in research - whether it is academic or commercial. We need to have safeguards in place including adequate interviewer training, which covers things like how to conduct surveys involving sensitive topics and prepares interviewers for the adverse events that can arise in the course of doing population surveys. Sensitive questions must not be included gratuitously.'

Pennay says that the Code of Professional Behaviour is immensely helpful to him in partnership projects with academic organisations.

‘Any work where we are partnered with academics needs ethics clearance and the code is very useful in helping gain this,' he says. ‘We cite the obligations of our code - such as privacy, confidentiality and our data management protocols - to demonstrate that our practices are consistent with the requirements of ethics committees.'

Professor Lyn Carson, from the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney, says that academics face significant restraints when bidding for government and social research work - even for projects that would be more suited to their expertise.

‘When Frank Brennan was running the National Human Rights Consultation in 2009, he realised he wasn't reaching certain marginalised and vulnerable groups - "individuals thought to be especially at risk of having their rights threatened or violated",' says Carson.

‘He knew it would be impossible to get academics to do that research within his time frame, because of the reality of going through ethics committees. He had no choice but to appoint a social research company that could reach the people he needed - and quickly.'

Carson believes that in general commercial operators can be faster and less constrained, while academics may have more credibility in terms of the validity and reliability of their work. She believes that partnerships offer the best of both worlds - but each partner needs to understand the world in which the other operates.

‘I'm currently pitching on a project where the commercial partner will do the random selection, which tends to be something commercial partners are very good at,' she says. ‘But in a previous project, the commercial partner misled me about the random selection - in fact the participants were selected from a pre-existing list - and this seriously compromised the validity of the project.

‘As academics, our methodology and findings will be viewed and challenged by our peers. Within academia we must back up our findings with great certainty.

‘I know the commercial partner learned something very significant about random selection as a result of that project! And I had a deeper insight into the practical difficulties of doing random selection - as opposed to the theory of it.'

However, John Rossiter, also an AMSRS Fellow, and a research professor at the University of Wollongong's Institute for Innovation in Business and Social Research, says the academic-practitioner research divide is not likely to be bridged easily. Rossiter recently spoke about the main problems to a packed house at an international conference of advertising research academics in Madrid.

‘Academic marketing researchers are rewarded for using multiple-item measures of basic constructs, such as attitude toward the ad and brand purchase intention, accompanied by impressive statistics such as coefficient alpha and structural equation modelling, which are complete overkill,' he says. ‘Practitioner researchers on the other side of the divide have to find accurate and cost-efficient single-item measures and report the findings in a manner comprehensible to clients.

‘Academic studies mostly employ college student samples and thus can get away with question wording that would not be understood by the average or lower-educated consumer. They often employ weak stimuli in their studies, such as unrealistic ads and brand names devoid of actual packs or logos, which is a further reason why managers don't pay much attention to academic research articles.'

Rossiter says that academics teaching market research often don't read practitioner research reports on real work marketing campaigns in trade publications such as the American Advertising Age and the British Admap, with the risk that many are teaching from an academic bubble.

There is evidently a big gap between academics' and practitioners' knowledge and research practices. Research institutes like those named above which build academic-practitioner collaboration - for example, by obtaining research funding from the Australian Research Council's program of Linkage Research Grants - represent the best hope for closing this gap.

The twain must meet

The arena of academic publishing offers significant opportunities for cross-fertilisation between the commercial and academic worlds. Bednall, who took on the role of editor of the Society's Australasian Journal of Market and Social Research (AJMSR) early this year, says that the journal aims to combine academic and practical approaches, focusing on issues that are of interest to both sides.

Bednall notes that the research industry relies on the craft developed in particular organisations and by industry leaders and thinkers. ‘The best of our commercial researchers, who present at conferences or win effectiveness awards, usually have illustrative case studies that may be suitable for writing up in academic journals. Commercial researchers are fortunate because they can implement and write up new ideas immediately, while academics often have very long lead times for getting their projects done and written up in the literature.'

Bednall says that market researchers should avail themselves of the vast amount of academic material available on research processes and methodologies.

‘These days most MR companies have people doing higher degrees who have access to electronic journal databases. If there are no students on staff then companies can organise subscriptions through university libraries. Access to these databases is literally a gold mine - they are a huge repository of information and give researchers the opportunity to keep up to date with seminal articles and specific journals of interest.'

The new joint program between the Social Research Centre and the Institute for Social Science Research will be one space to watch for those interested in bridging the worlds of the academy and the marketplace. In the meantime, the AJSMR is inviting submissions of original papers for its December edition - a chance for thinkers on both sides to make a contribution.

Jesse Blackadder, freelance writer
 

Call for contributors for December AJMSR

The Australasian Journal of Market & Social Research is the AMSRS's official journal and is published twice a year in electronic format. All papers are refereed by independent assessors. Contact the editor, associate professor David Bednall, on dbednall@deakin.edu.au