Projective Techniques in Qualitative Research

Qualitative Research includes an array of interpretative techniques which seek to describe, decode, translate, and otherwise come to terms with the meaning, not the frequency, of certain more or less naturally occurring phenomena in the social world.

Qualitative techniques are used at both the data collection and data analysis stages of a research project. Because researchers are often looking for hidden or suppressed meanings, Projective Techniques can be used within the interview structures. Some of these techniques include

Types of Projective Techniques

Word or Picture association: Participants are asked to match images, experiences, emotions, products and services, even people and places, to whatever is being studied.

Sentence completion: Participants are asked to complete a sentence.

Cartoons or empty balloons: Participants are asked to write the dialogue for a cartoon like picture.

Thematic Apperception Test: Participants are confronted with a picture (usually a photograph or drawing) and asked to describe how the person in the picture feels and thinks.

Component sorts: Participants are presented with flash cards containing component features and asked to create new combinations.

Sensory Sorts: Participants are presented with scents, textures, and sounds, usually verbalized on cards, and asked to arrange them by one or more criteria.

Laddering or benefit chain: Participants are asked to link functional features to their physical and psychological benefits, both real and ideal.

Imagination exercises: Participants are asked to relate the properties of one thing/person/brand to another.

Imaginary Universe: Participants are asked to assume that the brand and its users populate an entire universe; they then describe the features of this new world.

Visitor from another planet: Participants are asked to assume that they are aliens and are confronting the product for the first time: they then describe their reactions, questions, and attitudes about purchase or retrial.

Personification: Participants are asked to imagine inanimate objects with the traits, characteristics and features, and personalities of humans.

Authority figure: Participants are asked to imagine that the brand or product is an authority figure and to describe the attributes of the figure.

Ambiguities and paradoxes: Participants are asked to imagine a brand as something else, describing its attributes and position.

Semantic mapping: Participants are presented with a four-quadrant map where different variables anchor the two different axes; they then spatially place brands, product components, or organizations within the four quadrants.

Brand Mapping: Participants are presented with different brands and asked to talk about their perceptions, usually in relation to several criteria. They may also be asked to spatially place each brand on one or more semantic maps.