Market Research

By David Schneer

15-Minute Read

Somewhere along the way, an idea calcified into doctrine: if you want to know whether an ad works, you gather eight to ten strangers in a room with a two-way mirror, dim the lights, play the spot, and ask them what they think. But is this really the right way to evaluate an ad?

A Short History (Or: Why the Inventor Hated His Invention)

The “focused interview” was developed in the early 1940s by Robert K. Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld at Columbia University’s Bureau of Applied Social Research, originally to study the wartime propaganda films the U.S. War Department was producing for soldiers and civilians. Merton and Kendall (1946) first formalized the method in print, and Merton, Fiske, and Kendall (1956) elaborated it into a full manual. The protocol was rigorous. Respondents experienced the stimulus individually, then sat for a structured interview about specific moments of reaction. Group sessions existed, but they were a supplement to the individual data — never a replacement for it.

Eventually, Madison Avenue got its hands on the methodology, dropped the rigor, kept the conviviality, added a buffet complete with M&Ms, and called it a focus group.

By 1987, Merton himself was writing a corrective in Public Opinion Quarterly, warning that what the industry was practicing under the name “focus group” had drifted so far from his original method that the two should not be confused (Merton, 1987). He was, by all accounts, irritated. The methodology he co-invented for careful study of reaction had become, in the wrong hands, a virtual groupthink party with snacks. We have been ignoring his complaint for nearly forty years.

A Famous Experiment You May Not Remember

In 1951, around the same time Merton was refining his focused interview, Solomon Asch ran what is now one of the most replicated findings in social psychology. He showed groups of college students a card with a single line on it, then a second card with three lines of obviously different lengths and asked them to identify which of the three matched the first. The right answer was always plain. The catch: every other person in the room was a confederate, instructed to give the wrong answer in unison. The lone real participant gave a wrong answer to conform with the group roughly a third of the time — even when the right answer was sitting in front of his face (Asch, 1951; Asch, 1955).

These were not stupid people. These were intelligent young adults publicly contradicting their own eyes because seven other people in the room had agreed on something different.

Now picture that dynamic in a focus group. The first respondent says, “I thought the ad was kind of condescending.” Now the cat is out of the bag.  It does not matter whether she is right. It does not matter whether anyone else agrees. From that moment on, the rest of the room is not reacting to your ad. They are reacting to her opinion of your ad. You just paid forty thousand dollars to run Solomon Asch’s experiment with crappy controls.

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The Argument

Let’s take a Point-Counterpoint approach to the most common defenses of the focus group as the venue for ad testing.

Point: Focus Groups Surface Insights Individuals Miss

Proponents argue that the magic of a group is the chemistry between respondents — that one person’s comment unlocks another’s and outpours a richness no individual interview produces.

Counterpoint: True, but for the Wrong Job

Group dynamics absolutely surface things. They surface social proof, conformity, and sometimes, status maneuvering—the particular comments a respondent thinks will make her sound thoughtful in front of strangers. These are real human phenomena, and qualitative researchers should take heed. But none of them is what an ad has to overcome. An ad must land on one person, alone, in under seconds, while the person is preoccupied. If you want to know whether your ad survives that encounter, you must recreate that encounter—not host a salon for eight.

Point: The Group Helps People Open Up

This argument goes that strangers feed off each other, that hearing one person be honest gives the others permission, and that the group is a kind of accelerant for candor.

Counterpoint: The Group Is Also an Accelerant for Performance

Sometimes it accelerates candor. Other times, it accelerates performance — respondents auditioning for the moderator, the client behind the glass, or each other. They reach for the witty line, the morally safe answer, the answer that sounds sophisticated. Others follow and agree. Janis (1972) named the phenomenon “groupthink”, and Sunstein and Hastie (2015) demonstrated that group deliberation can head toward the direction that the room leans first. Ad reactions are exactly the kind of thing groups distort fastest, because the social cost of admitting “that one made me cry” or “I didn’t get it” is higher than the social cost of just going along.

Point: We Need to See Real Emotional Reactions

Some clients want to see laughter, confusion, the eyeroll, the tear—the entertainment of it all. The group, defenders say, is the only place those moments occur.

Counterpoint: They Happen More Honestly in One-on-Ones

Heath (2012) and Wood (2019) document at length that advertising response is largely pre-verbal — a System 1 process in Kahneman’s (2011) framework — happening in the first second or two of exposure, before the prefrontal cortex assembles a sentence about it. Barden (2013) makes the same case for marketing decisions broadly. You see those reactions cleanest when nothing else is competing for the respondent’s attention: not seven other faces, not a moderator’s smile, not the imagined audience behind the mirror.

Point: Respondents Will Tell Us Why They Reacted That Way

The whole point of qualitative research is the why, defenders argue. And the group, they say, is where the why comes out.

Counterpoint: Asking Why Produces Answers That are Seen Before They Are Heard.

I am, for the record, a defender of asking why (Schneer, 2026). Used well, it is the most natural probe we have. But there is a difference between asking why someone holds a considered opinion and asking why someone reacted, in three-quarters of a second, to a piece of pre-verbal stimulus. The first question has an answer. The second one does not — at least not one the respondent has access to. Zaltman (2003) argues that the great majority of consumer cognition happens below conscious awareness. Wilson (2002) goes further: people are systematically poor narrators of their own mental processes. Asked why an ad made them feel a certain way, respondents will answer. They will sound coherent. The answer will be a confabulation. In a group, it will additionally be tuned to the room.

Point: Clients Need to Watch — and Focus Groups Are More Convenient

This is the most honest defense, even if its proponents rarely claim it. The two-way mirror, the conference room, the buffet, the client smirking at the loud talker’s comments — that is the product. Clients want to feel close to the consumer, and the focus group is a venue that delivers the feeling; that is, if the learning is compressed into two hours, runs in the evening, and does not interfere with the rest of their schedule. Sit through eight 60-minute In-Depth Interviews (IDI) spread over two days? As they say in New York, fuhgeddaboudit.

Yes, this has happened to me and more than once, with clients who would not budge off a group format the procurement department had pre-approved. We compensated by having respondents fill in self-administered questionnaires before they spoke — capturing the private reaction before the room could contaminate it — but the cost of that workaround was real. The exercise in front-loaded silence poured water on the energy of the group, and some clients found that quite uncomfortable.

Counterpoint: Silent Opinions

There is a version of the group format that can work, even for evaluative jobs, and it is worth naming. In a clinic-style group, respondents enter the room, see the stimulus, and immediately record their reactions privately — on a tablet, on a paper questionnaire, on whatever device captures the answer before another voice in the room can shape it. Discussion comes way after. The group then becomes a place to interpret reactions that have already been committed in private, not a place to manufacture them in public.

This worked well, per Asch (1955), who observed that conformity ebbs when participants can record their answer privately before group exposure. It also binds them to their written answers. The individual data tell you what the respondent actually thought; the discussion that follows tells you how she will defend and rationalize her view among peers. Two different things, both useful.

The catch is that some clients will not budge. They want the room hot and the discussion live, not eight people silently typing into iPads for the first ten minutes. The silent-vote front end is a workaround, not a solution. The right answer is still to use the right tool for the question. Silent Opinions is the honorable second-best.

Counterpoint: Comfort Is Everything (and Groups Are Not Comfortable)

I noted in Backbone that respondents need to feel safe before any probe lands well, and that comfort and perceived safety drive almost everything in qualitative work (Schneer, 2024). The focus group fails this test on its own terms. A respondent in a 1:1 with a warm moderator is, after a few minutes, more candid than she ever will be in a room of strangers. The group is not a place of comfort. It is a place of discussion, monitored by a stranger, observed through one-way glass, watched by people whose names are unknown. The “comfort” of the group is the comfort of conformity. That is exactly what you do not want when you are trying to understand whether a thirty-second commercial is moving.

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When the Group Is the Right Tool (and When It Isn’t)

The choice is not whether focus groups are good or bad. They are tools. The question is whether the tool fits the job.

Use the group when the unit of analysis is the conversation itself — how consumers talk about a category, what language they use among peers, where they agree and disagree, which features of an idea they elaborate on when they hear someone else’s reaction. Groups earn their keep for category exploration, hypothesis generation, stress-testing positioning territories, and workshop-style co-creation. They are right when peer dynamics are the phenomenon you came to study: B2B influence networks, household decision dynamics, social consumption.

Use individual interviews — and, for advertising specifically, individual exposures with structured probing afterward — when the unit of analysis is the person. IDIs are the right tool for ad evaluation, concept testing, pricing research, sensitive topics (money, health, identity, parenting), B2B work with senior executives (where peers will not be candid in front of one another or get into a pissing match), and anything where social desirability bias would distort the answer. If your decision rests on the individual reaction, the group will get in the way of seeing it.

A short version, because clients usually want one. Group: “How do people in this category talk to each other?” IDI: “What does this person actually think?” Confuse those two questions, and the methodology will not save you.

My Take

Focus groups are not useless. They are excellent for the right job. The point is to know which job that is.

Ad evaluation is not it. The format optimizes for the wrong things. It contaminates the very reaction you came to measure. It rewards the loudest voice, punishes the softest, and produces a deliverable so rich with quotes that it feels like data when it is mostly transcript.

Test your ad the way it will actually be encountered: alone, distracted, briefly. Pair the depth of a 1:1 with implicit response measurement to capture what the respondent cannot tell you (Nelson-Field, 2020). Binet and Field (2013) have shown that emotional response is the strongest predictor of in-market effectiveness. If you measure it in the wrong room, you will optimize against the wrong signal. This is why nonverbal intelligence training is critical for qualitative researchers.

The focus group will tell you many useful things. Whether your ad works is not one of them.

If your business is making creative decisions based on what a room full of strangers said in the dark, it might be time to test those assumptions. The team at Merrill Research builds qualitative designs that match the question, including ad evaluation that respects how ads are actually consumed. https://merrillresearch.com/contact/

References

Asch, Solomon E. 1951. “Effects of Group Pressure upon the Modification and Distortion of Judgments.” In Groups, Leadership, and Men, edited by Harold Guetzkow, 177–190. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Press.

Asch, Solomon E. 1955. “Opinions and Social Pressure.” Scientific American 193, no. 5: 31–35.

Barden, Phil. 2013. Decoded: The Science Behind Why We Buy. Chichester: Wiley.

Binet, Les, and Peter Field. 2013. The Long and the Short of It: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies. London: Institute of Practitioners in Advertising.

Heath, Robert. 2012. Seducing the Subconscious: The Psychology of Emotional Influence in Advertising. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Janis, Irving L. 1972. Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Merton, Robert K. 1987. “The Focussed Interview and Focus Groups: Continuities and Discontinuities.” Public Opinion Quarterly 51, no. 4: 550–566.

Merton, Robert K., and Patricia L. Kendall. 1946. “The Focused Interview.” American Journal of Sociology 51, no. 6: 541–557.

Merton, Robert K., Marjorie Fiske, and Patricia L. Kendall. 1956. The Focused Interview: A Manual of Problems and Procedures. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Nelson-Field, Karen. 2020. The Attention Economy and How Media Works: Simple Truths for Marketers. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan.

Schneer, David M. 2024. Backbone: Surviving the Road Less Quantified — Toward a Deeper Understanding of Qualitative Research.

Schneer, David M. 2026. “To Why or Not to Why: That Is the Question.” Merrill Research blog.

Sunstein, Cass R., and Reid Hastie. 2015. Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press.

Wilson, Timothy D. 2002. Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Wood, Orlando. 2019. Lemon: How the Advertising Brain Turned Sour. London: Institute of Practitioners in Advertising.

Zaltman, Gerald. 2003. How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

By David Schneer

11-Minute Read

In some qualitative research training circles, a curious orthodoxy has taken root: asking respondents “why?” is supposedly too direct, too interrogatory, too likely to trigger discomfort or defensiveness. Softer alternatives—“Tell me more” or “Can you elaborate?”—are prescribed instead. I think that’s nonsense. Let me explain why (pun absolutely intended).

A Short Etymology (Or: We’ve Been Asking Why Since the Bronze Age)

“Why” descends from Old English hwī, the instrumental case of hwæt—the ancestor of our modern “what.” Trace it further back, and you land in Proto-Germanic hwī and ultimately in the Proto-Indo-European interrogative root kʷo-, which also produced Latin qui and quis, Greek tís, and Sanskrit kaḥ (Harper, 2001–2024).

Humans have been asking why for roughly as long as we’ve been asking anything at all.

It is arguably our most economical question word: one syllable, three letters, one puff of air—and you have just invited another person to, as is said, “spill their guts.”

Anyone who has spent an afternoon with a three-year-old knows asking why is devastatingly effective. Developmental psychologists call the relentless interrogations young children inflict upon their parents the “why phase.” They are not taught this behavior. Chouinard (2007) found that preschoolers ask a mind-numbingly 70 to 100 questions an hour, many of them why-questions aimed at causal explanation. Frazier, Gelman, and Wellman (2009) showed that children are genuinely dissatisfied with evasive answers and will re-ask until the adult coughs up actual causation. They do not say, “Mommy, could you please elaborate?” Rather, they batter you with “why?”

A Higher Power

For those of you who want to appeal to a Higher Power, the following is what Scripture has to say about the subject. A search of the New American Standard Bible (NASB) yields 392 occurrences across two forms—capitalized Why (288) and a lower case why (104). Hits per 1,000 words spike hardest in 2 Samuel, Job, Psalms, Jeremiah, and the Gospels—the books of grief, lament, and anguished cries for explanation, as recorded in the Book of Mark.

“My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Mark 15:34, NASB) is not a softened elaboration request. It is the rawest possible why. Had the author recorded, “Tell me more about your current evasiveness,” the canon would be considerably less moving. In both forms, the word does in Scripture what it does in a focus group: it presses past surface into cause.

St. Paul the Ethnographer, Rome the Pollster

Scripture also supplies two of the earliest recognizable research methods in Western theological canon. As I argue in Backbone: Surviving the Road Less Quantified; Toward a Deeper Understanding of Qualitative Research (Schneer, 2024), the Apostle Paul’s stay in Athens resembles proto-ethnography. Before his speech at the Areopagus, he walked the streets, observed the altars, and dialogued with passersby—the Greek dialegomai implying a true two-way exchange (Acts 17). Biblical scholar F. F. Bruce notes Paul “debated day by day with those who happened to be around” in the Agora, absorbing the local color and atmosphere of the city. Engagement, observation, dialogue—qualitative fieldwork two millennia before Spradley (1979) labeled it. Paul did his homework.

The quantitative tradition also appears in the same canon. The word census appears seventeen times in Scripture—used to count congregants, families, military strength, and, under Rome, taxpayers (Luke 2:1–3). By 6 CE, Caesar’s census was the machinery behind a tribute that exceeded forty percent of a Jewish peasant’s annual income (Schneer, 2024).

That’s right. Your high taxes are nothing new. Between Paul’s street-level ethnography and Rome’s bean counting, the two hemispheres of modern research already had working prototypes. And Paul, notably, kept asking why.

The Argument

Let’s take a Point-Counterpoint approach to spotlight both sides of the argument.

Point: “Why” Is Confrontational

Proponents argue that “why” puts respondents on the spot and invites post-hoc rationalization. In clinical contexts, the caution has warrant—Rogers and the motivational interviewing literature note that “why” questions can imply judgment.

Counterpoint: Tone Trumps Vocabulary

Discomfort doesn’t live inside a word. It lives in delivery, environment, and rapport. A moderator asking, “why do you say that?” in a soft, curious, neutral tone is having a conversation—not an interrogation. The same words barked by a hostile attorney feel entirely different. You don’t blame the hammer for the carpenter.

Your friends at dinner don’t say, “Could you elaborate on your preference for the pinot?” They say, “Why that one?”Conversational authenticity reduces defensiveness. Kipling ranks “Why” second among the question words more than a century ago: “Their names are What and Why and When / And How and Where and Who” (Kipling, 1902). Coincidence? Not likely.

Point: The Evidence Is Thin

To be fair, the broader peer-reviewed literature on questions in interview-based settings is real and respectable. Williams (2023) reviews the immediate effects of question types in psychotherapy. Thompson, Howes, and McCabe (2016) coded 134 outpatient psychiatric consultations and found that “wh-” questions yielded poorer results. Renger (2023) interviewed person-centered therapists about how and why they ask questions despite their tradition’s official ambivalence about them.

In another camp, the motivational interviewing tradition has its own sizable evidence base (Hettema, Steele, and Miller, 2005), and Hermans’s self-confrontation method, built on a structured sequence of open questions, has been peer-reviewed and refined over decades (Hermans, 1990; Lyddon and Yowell, 2006). Developmental and forensic psychologists have studied “Why” and “How Come” questions in children specifically (Wylie, Stolzenberg, and Evans, 2021; Ronfard, Zambrana, Hermansen, and Kelemen, 2018).

That all sounds promising—until you ask the actual question at hand. None of this work isolates the word why, in adult qualitative interviewing, against the prescribed alternatives (“tell me more,” “can you elaborate,” “help me understand”) to test whether why specifically degrades data quality, increases defensiveness, or yields more post-hoc rationalization. Thompson and colleagues come closest, and even there, why is folded into a “wh-” bucket alongside what, when, where, and who. The developmental studies are about whether seven-year-olds can answer why accurately—not whether adults in a focus group land softer when asked, “tell me more.” The motivational interviewing cautions against why lives in the textbook tradition (Miller and Rollnick, 2013), not in a controlled trial isolating the word.

In short, the macro views show that questions matter and that form matters; the micro—does the single word why damage qualitative interviews relative to softer probes?—has not been tested in any peer-reviewed work I can find. The “don’t ask why” rule shows up in training manuals, practitioner blogs, and books like STOP Wasting Words (Eisenberg and Mahar, 2019), which I genuinely like and recommend except for its stance on why. If “why” truly damaged data quality, we’d see controlled studies demonstrating it. We don’t. Socrates’s elenchus was a relentless chain of why-questions (Plato, c. 399 BCE/1892). If the word were truly corrosive to sincere disclosure, The Apology would be a much shorter dialogue.

Counterpoint: Comfort Is Everything

Numerous studies show that respondents simply need to feel safe before any probe lands well—and I agree with that version entirely. In BACKBONE, I tell the story of two gas stations sitting catacorner—one dim but cheap, the other bright and pricier. People consistently gravitated to the bright one. Comfort and perceived safety win (Schneer, 2024). The same principle applies in a focus group room. When respondents feel welcomed—warm introduction, relaxed posture, genuine curiosity from the moderator—“why” becomes an invitation, not an attack. Strip the rapport away, and every probe feels intrusive, including “tell me more.” The discipline is in the delivery, not in the word

My Take

The anti-why rule confuses symptom with cause. Practitioners who get defensive reactions blame the word when the real culprit could be a “cold” room, a rushed moderator, or a respondent who never felt heard. “Why” is not the problem. Bad delivery is.

You can use “tell me more.” Or “can you elaborate?” Or even, “help me understand.” But don’t kill “why.” It is the most natural, human probe we have, and when delivered with warmth, it unlocks the very depths qualitative research exists to capture. From St. Paul to a three-year-old in the back seat, the word has done the same essential work for millennia.

So: to why, or not to why? Why, of course. Just ask it kindly.

If the right question can open the right door, what might it unlock for your business? If your organization has questions worth answering, assumptions worth testing, or decisions that deserve more than guesswork, ask them kindly and ask them well. The team at Merrill Research knows how to get past surface-level responses and uncover what people truly think, feel, and do. https://merrillresearch.com/contact/

References

Chouinard, M. M. 2007. “Children’s Questions: A Mechanism for Cognitive Development.” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 72, no. 1: 1–112.

Eisenberg, S., and S. E. Mahar. 2019. STOP Wasting Words: Leading with Conscious Communications, 110–12. Charleston, SC: Advantage Media.

Frazier, Brandy N., Susan A. Gelman, and Henry M. Wellman. 2009. “Preschoolers’ Search for Explanatory Information within Adult–Child Conversation.” Child Development 80, no. 6: 1592–1611.

Harper, Douglas. 2001–2024. “Why.” Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/word/why.

Hermans, Hubert J. M. 1990. “Self-Confrontation as a Method for Assessment and Intervention in Counseling.” Journal of Counseling & Development 69, no. 2: 156–162.

Hettema, Jennifer, Julie Steele, and William R. Miller. 2005. “Motivational Interviewing.” Annual Review of Clinical Psychology 1: 91–111.

Kipling, Rudyard. 1902. “The Elephant’s Child.” In Just So Stories for Little Children. London: Macmillan.

Kvale, Steinar, and Svend Brinkmann. 2009. InterViews: Learning the Craft of Qualitative Research Interviewing. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Lyddon, William J., and Darrell R. Yowell. 2006. “The Self-Confrontation Method: Theory, Research, and Practical Utility.” Counselling Psychology Quarterly 19, no. 1: 27–43.

Miller, William R., and Stephen Rollnick. 2013. Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change. 3rd ed. New York: Guilford Press.

New American Standard Bible. 1995. Updated ed. 2020. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation.

Plato. (ca. 399 BCE) 1892. “Apology.” Translated by Benjamin Jowett. In The Dialogues of Plato, 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Renger, Suzanne. 2023. “Therapists’ Views on the Use of Questions in Person-Centred Therapy.” British Journal of Guidance & Counselling 51, no. 2: 238–250.

Rogers, Carl R. 1961. On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Ronfard, Samuel, Imac M. Zambrana, Tone K. Hermansen, and Deborah Kelemen. 2018. “Question-Asking in Childhood: A Review of the Literature and a Framework for Understanding Its Development.” Developmental Review 49: 101–120.

Schneer, David M. 2024. Backbone: Surviving the Road Less Quantified — Toward a Deeper Understanding of Qualitative Research.

Spradley, James P. 1979. The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Thompson, Laura, Christine Howes, and Rose McCabe. 2016. “Effect of Questions Used by Psychiatrists on Therapeutic Alliance and Adherence.” British Journal of Psychiatry 209, no. 1: 40–47.

Williams, Elizabeth Nutt. 2023. “The Use of Questions in Psychotherapy: A Review of Research on Immediate Outcomes.” Psychotherapy 60, no. 3: 246–254.

Wylie, Breanne E., Stacia N. Stolzenberg, and Angela D. Evans. 2021. “Children’s Accuracy in Answering Why and How Come Questions.” International Journal of Behavioral Development 45, no. 5: 423–428.

By David Schneer, Ph.D.

12-Minute Read

“The mind is like an iceberg. It floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.”— Sigmund Freud

Qualitative research has always been built on a single, audacious premise: that if you listen carefully enough, people will tell you the truth. Not necessarily with their words—but with their hesitations, their contradictions, their body language, the things they almost say before pulling back. For more than a century, the practitioners of this discipline have refined the art of reading between the lines. And yet, for most of that history, the tools we’ve used to do it haven’t changed all that much.

Until now.

We are living through what I believe is the most significant transformation qualitative research has experienced since its founding. The convergence of nonverbal intelligence and artificial intelligence in applied qualitative behavioral science is fundamentally reshaping what it means to listen. And those of us who’ve spent decades in this field have a choice: we can cling to the methods that got us here, or we can lead the discipline into its next era. I vote for the latter.

To understand where we’re going, we need to understand where we’ve been. The story of qualitative research is richer—and stranger—than most people realize.

The Psychoanalytic Root: The Freudian Connection

Let’s be clear. Sigmund Freud never moderated a focus group. He never sat behind a one-way mirror or drafted a discussion guide. Nevertheless, his DNA is all over qualitative research.

In the 1890s, Freud developed a set of techniques—free association, dream interpretation, the analysis of slips and resistances—designed to access what lay beneath conscious thought. This insight is still the foundation of every qualitative study conducted today. When a respondent in a focus group says she “loves” a product concept but simultaneously crosses her arms, breaks eye contact, and flashes a micro expression of disgust, we’re operating in Freudian territory—the territory of the unconscious signal.

This observational instinct—the conviction that surface behavior conceals deeper truths—that was the gift he gave to qualitative researchers.

Merton, Lazarsfeld, and the Birth of the “Focused Interview”

The leap from Freud to the research facility occurred in the 1940s. Robert K. Merton, a sociologist at Columbia University, was collaborating with Paul Lazarsfeld on a government project studying the effectiveness of wartime propaganda. They needed to understand how audiences reacted to radio broadcasts and training films—not just whether they liked them, but why certain messages landed, and others fell flat.

Merton’s solution was what he called the “focused interview.” He assembled small groups of people who had shared the same experience—in this case, listening to the same broadcast—and guided them through a structured but open-ended conversation about their reactions. The method was designed to surface subjective experience in a way that could be systematically analyzed.

When Merton published The Focused Interview in 1956, he gave the field its first rigorous methodology. This was no longer therapy. This was market research. The questions were planned. The facilitation was intentional. The analysis was meant to produce actionable understanding, not personal healing.

Dichter and the Motivational Turn

If Merton built the structure, Ernest Dichter furnished it. A Viennese psychologist who emigrated to the United States in 1938, Dichter is often called the “father of motivational research,” and he earned the title by doing something no one else had thought to do: he took Freud’s depth psychology and pointed it directly at consumer behavior.

Dichter’s work in the 1950s and 60s was electrifying. He convinced Procter & Gamble that soap was about purification rituals, not cleaning. He helped automakers understand the sex appeal of convertibles and the family comfort of sedans. His methods were deliberately provocative—projective techniques, symbolic analysis, deep one-on-one interviews that lasted hours.

Dichter, however, would be vilified in Vance Packard’s 1957 book, “The Hidden Persuaders”—framing motivational research as corporate mind control. The blowback was so severe that the industry tilted toward the safety of quantitative methods for the next two decades.

But Dichter’s lasting contribution was the idea that qualitative research could deliver insights that numbers just can’t. He proved that understanding people’s decisions requires going beneath the surface—and that doing so has enormous commercial value.

The Golden Age of the Focus Group (and Its Limitations)

By the 1970s and 80s, the focus group had become the default instrument of qualitative research. Purpose-built facilities sprang up in every major market. The format standardized: eight to ten respondents, two-hour sessions, a moderator with a discussion guide, clients watching from behind the mirror, with the cameras rolling. It was efficient, scalable, and endlessly repeatable.

It was also deeply flawed.

Forget for a minute that focus groups have been one of the most misused methodologies (i.e., using them for evaluation when in-depth interviews would be more appropriate), the traditional focus group was designed to capture what people say—and it did that well. But it was never designed to capture anything else: the micro-expressions, the postural shifts, the bodily movements that reveal the gap between stated opinion and actual feeling. Moderators who were trained in group dynamics and questioning techniques rarely had equivalent training in nonverbal behavior. I say this not to dismiss the work that was done during those decades—some of the best qualitative research in history happened behind those mirrors—but to name a structural limitation that the industry mostly chose to ignore.

We were listening to half the conversation.

The Digital Disruption: New Channels

The internet era brought online communities, bulletin board studies, mobile ethnography, and eventually the wholesale migration to video platforms. Like gasoline on fire, COVID-19 accelerated what was already underway, and by 2021, virtual qualitative had gone from novelty to norm. Suddenly, respondents were on Zoom, framed from the chest up, lit by laptop screens, performing for cameras in their kitchens. The industry celebrated the efficiency gains: no travel, faster recruitment, broader geographic reach, lower costs. All true.

But digital disruption gave us new channels for qualitative research. It did not solve the fundamental problem of relying on human words alone.

The AI Inflection Point: Where We Are Now

This is the moment where the story changes. Over the past several years, artificial intelligence—particularly in the domains of emotion recognition, micro-expression detection, and behavioral pattern analysis—has matured to the point where it can serve as a genuine analytical partner in qualitative research. Not a replacement for the researcher. A partner.

Here is what that looks like in practice. At Merrill Research, we now run qualitative studies where AI is operating in parallel during live sessions. While I am following the thread of the conversation, delivering relevant probes, and managing the software platform (if virtual), I am also trained in nonverbal intelligence with the ability to spot differences between the vocal and corporeal. Meanwhile, the AI algorithm is tracking right along with me—recording micro-expressions that last less than a second. It’s detecting incongruence between what someone says and what their body is doing in the one-to-three-second window after a provocative question lands—just like me. It is a belt-and-suspenders approach to keeping your pants up.

The implications are profound. For the first time in the history of this discipline, we can systematically capture and analyze the nonverbal dimension of qualitative data. What was always intuition—the experienced moderator’s gut feeling that something was off—can now be documented, timestamped, corroborated, and repeated. The iceberg that Freud described is finally visible beneath the waterline.

What This Means for the Profession

I’ve spent more than four decades in qualitative research. I’ve watched this industry evolve through multiple cycles of disruption. And I can say with confidence that what is happening right now is different in kind, not just in degree.

The researchers who will define the next era of this discipline are the ones who understand that AI doesn’t diminish the value of human expertise—it raises the bar for what expertise and precision mean. A moderator trained in body language who can integrate AI-flagged nonverbal data into their real-time facilitation is operating at a level that was simply impossible five years ago.

This is qualitative research’s Moneyball moment. The scouts who embraced analytics didn’t become obsolete—they became more valuable. The same is true here. But only if we’re willing to evolve.

The Next Hundred Years

Freud gave us the conviction that surface behavior conceals deeper truth. Merton gave us a methodology for systematically surfacing subjective experience. Dichter proved that depth psychology had commercial value. The focus group industry built an infrastructure for listening at scale. The digital revolution expanded our reach. And now, nonverbal intelligence and AI are giving us the capacity to finally hear what was always there but beyond our perceptual grasp.

Each generation of qualitative researchers has stood on the shoulders of the one before. We are no different. What is different is the magnitude of the opportunity. We are not simply refining existing methods. We are building a new epistemology for empirical qualitative insight—one that integrates verbal, nonverbal, and computationally detected signals into a richer, more honest picture of what people actually think and feel.

For organizations seeking to move beyond surface-level insights and access a deeper, more precise understanding of human behavior, Merrill Research offers a forward-looking approach that integrates qualitative expertise, nonverbal intelligence, and AI-driven analysis. To explore how this methodology can be applied to your business challenges, contact Merrill Research at: https://merrillresearch.com/contact/

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David Schneer, Ph.D., is the CEO of Merrill Research and author of “BACKBONE: Surviving the Road Less Quantified; Toward a Deeper Understanding of Qualitative Research.” With over 40 years of experience in the field, he is pioneering the merger of body language and AI-powered behavioral analysis into modern qualitative methodology.

Bibliography

Breuer, Josef, and Sigmund Freud. Studies on Hysteria. Translated and edited by James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 2000. First published 1895 by Franz Deuticke (Leipzig and Vienna).

Dichter, Ernest. The Strategy of Desire. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960.

Dichter, Ernest. Handbook of Consumer Motivations: The Psychology of the World of Objects. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.

Merton, Robert K. Mass Persuasion: The Social Psychology of a War Bond Drive. With the assistance of Marjorie Fiske and Alberta Curtis. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946.

Merton, Robert K., and Patricia L. Kendall. “The Focused Interview.” American Journal of Sociology 51, no. 6 (May 1946): 541–557.

Merton, Robert K., Marjorie Fiske, and Patricia L. Kendall. The Focused Interview: A Manual of Problems and Procedures. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1956.

Morgan, David L. Focus Groups as Qualitative Research. 2nd ed. Qualitative Research Methods Series, vol. 16. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997.

Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. New York: David McKay Company, 1957.

Horowitz, Daniel. “The Birth of a Salesman: Ernest Dichter and the Objects of Desire.” Hagley Museum and Library. Accessed 2026.

Pooley, Jefferson. “Fifteen Pages That Shook the Field: Personal Influence, Edward Shils, and the Remembered History of Mass Communication Research.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 608 (2006): 130–156.

Note on Epigraph Attribution

The iceberg metaphor used in the epigraph (“The mind is like an iceberg. It floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water”) is widely attributed to Freud, but its provenance is disputed. According to Quote Investigator, the earliest known use of the mind/iceberg simile dates to G. Stanley Hall in 1898, with attribution to Freud appearing only in 1929. The metaphor is used here because it has become culturally synonymous with Freud’s concept of the unconscious, even if he may not have originated the precise phrasing. See: O’Toole, Garson. “Simile Origin: The Mind Is Like an Iceberg.” Quote Investigator, August 7, 2024.