Krishan Lathigra and Amrita Sood
First published in Research World May 2009
Citizen journalism supports news-makers all over the world. How can it help research?
On the face of it, citizen journalism is something that the research community might regard with scepticism. In the media, it is often associated with amateurs who happen to find themselves in the right place at the right time, contributing photos and ill-considered opinions on topics that they may not know much about.
In fact, the trend has relevance to the research community worldwide. It can be used to provide independent, relevant insights which are essential to empower communities and inform democratic processes.
Citizen journalism, simply defined, covers citizens using the internet as a platform for blogging, uploading photographs and video footage; contributing to forums and participating in debates that critique current social and political issues.
Its rise is roughly correlated with the exponential growth in, and access to, camera-enabled mobile phones, the internet and the emergence of platforms on which output can be broadcast, such as YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, the Huffington Post and CNN i-report. These platforms that have become ubiquitous over the last few years, and although citizen journalism has inherent – and obvious – flaws, it has become unavoidable.
Reinventing the news
While media organisations have positively embraced and integrated citizen journalism into their offering, often reinventing themselves to do so, researchers have continued to simply expect people to answer their questions. On the whole, the industry has remained faithful to its original model of researcher, respondent and client, only incorporating a marginal blending of those boundaries.
The relevance of citizen journalism in research emerged during the course of a study conducted by GfK NOP, in association with the Central Office of Information (COI), the UK Government’s centre of excellence for marketing and communications. The qualitative research investigated the experiences of citizens caught up in the severe floods that affected England during the summer of 2007
Those at the centre of events had photographed, filmed, blogged and uploaded their experiences, documenting their own story as it unfolded. To harness the richness of this copious and uncontrollable data, the research team needed to allow the unique and idiosyncratic nature of the individual stories to emerge, while simultaneously avoiding the risk of stifling them with a linear, highly-defined research process.
The result was a research structure focusing on the needs and preferences of the respondents. People were invited to tell their stories in a variety of ways, and the ensuing dataset included emails, personal photos taken by digital camera and mobile phone, video footage taken by participants, vox pops and written accounts, as well as data resulting from focus groups and depth interviews.
Powerful stories
The cross-fertilisation among this breadth of data formats resulted in new avenues for investigation, and ultimately the research team was able to utilise many powerful individual stories to create a vivid and compelling narrative.
Rich and revealing research into the floods was made possible through harnessing the power of citizen journalism. The unique circumstances surrounding the research made it particularly conducive to an open-ended, loosely-defined data-gathering process, but the experience suggests that there could be much wider application of these ideas.
Incorporating citizen journalism into research is not about simply creating a video pre-task, or using an online medium. It is about opening up some of the more process-driven aspects of research, and questioning them, to arrive at a different model. To this end, citizen journalism can be incorporated into research studies in a number of ways.
Firstly, respondents might react more positively to being accorded the power to respond to a business problem in their own way, rather than to a researcher’s line of questioning. For example, citizen journalism is naturally linked to specific events, where traditional tools and techniques may not be appropriate. Any study exploring parenthood, retirement or major purchases would clearly benefit from this approach.
Researchers need to accept that there are a number of ways to reach the same goal, and that a group discussion will work for some, whereas a blog or a video diary will be a more natural medium of self-expression for others. This demands a revision of the role of the researcher from that of the process manager to the enabler or facilitator.
Obviously, not all research projects are appropriate for this approach. A study focusing on a very low-involvement brand or product category, for example, might not prompt the participant commitment or yield the richness of data required from an open-ended approach. Furthermore, not everybody has access to IT, is technically literate or feels inclined to contribute via citizen journalism tools. It may be that in some cases, traditional methods will be preferable in order to ensure an inclusive approach.
Part of the conversation
Above all, it is important to know the respondents. An empowered, opinionated content-up-loading audience operates best when it is passionately involved and engaged with its topic in some way. If this involvement isn’t generated by virtue of the subject matter, it might be necessary to foster it by making the participants central to the process, and allowing them to control it to some extent, generating a sense of ownership of the outcome. Allowing them to have a role in telling the final story to the client could be one way of providing this impetus, bringing the participant in to be part of the research team. This new environment requires research participants to be given an elevated position as a part of the conversation, instead of simply being a respondent.
The benefits to clients of incorporating elements of citizen journalism into certain research projects are undeniable. Firstly, it makes the research results come alive: they look and sound like a documentary with the voices of those ‘interviewed’ telling their own story directly to the client. Secondly, it brings respondents that are traditionally just passive, nameless and faceless, close to the client who wants to get to know them. While research techniques drawn from citizen journalism may never be as objective as traditional research methods, they are equally – and arguably more – credible and verifiable.
In some ways we are all citizen journalists, but the traditional research world may need to change its mindset if we are all to take full advantage of this new and developing phenomenon.
Krishan Lathigra is senior research manager at COI Research and Amrita Sood is research director at GfK NOP Social Research.
