There’s everything you would expect there, from open questions and closed, pre-coded questions, places to provide descriptions, welcome texts and explanations, cues to present any multi-media stimulus material you may wish to display and questions where you request an upload of a photo, document or even a video. You can build an exercise very simply from a toolbox of components. You can cue them exercises to start on different days, and if you are planning some kind of diary activity, an exercise can be made to repeat. The way the software works as a researcher, is that you log into your account on the Revelation server and create a series of activities for your respondents to take, building different tasks from a toolbox of stimuli. Revelation allows you to decide, for each question you ask, whether the responses are to be visible to others – before they respond (“influenced”), only after they respond (“uninfluenced”) or even withheld from all but the moderator and any client observers (“private”). Participants can be encouraged to contribute much more in the way of content, taking the focus group into the realms of auto-ethnography and co-creation. Under the influenceĪ Revelation group can take place over several days, or even weeks, with new questions or exercises being presented on a daily basis. Researchers and clients may feel the same but, more importantly, by moving beyond the temporal and spatial constraint of the single-point-in-time group, they may find they get richer and more considered insights. Respondents tend to welcome the convenience of being able to participate whenever they choose from the comfort of their own home or office.
Revelation is a piece of web-based software that provides a rich environment for qualitative researchers to design internet-age research projects that play to the strengths of the medium.
Online qualitative research does not need to be a pale imitation of conventional face-to-face groups and depths, and it is better not to try.
Tim Macer reviews an online qualitative research environment for depth interviewing, discussions and ethnographic studies.
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