Reflections on conducting qualitative research in the Philippines

At the start of 2019 I moved to Singapore from my homeland of Australia. In Singapore, I work as a strategic designer and spend significant time conducting user research. I had lots of experience conducting user research before the move, but I have learnt many new things from working in a new continent, country and cultural context.

 This article outlines some of my reflections and learnings from the customer research I’ve completed over the past year, with a focus on my work in late 2019 in the Philippines.

Good research preparation was critical. Especially important were common cultural norms, social practices, brands and institutions

Spending time living and working in the country before diving into the research helped me develop a better understanding of some of the intangible aspects that are hard to appreciate from desktop research alone. As well as understanding things like forms of address, how to dress respectfully and how to greet people, specific things I found useful to understand from a user research perspective are:

• The brands and organisations common in that country and context. When I was doing research in financial services in the Philippines I had to know the major players in financial services, but also the ways in which people spend money. For example, I had to know that Lazada is an online marketplace and that Meralco is a power company. I also had to understand some of the different methods used to spend money such as ewallet GCash. Knowing these without having to ask increased the fluency of the interview and the rapport I built with the participant.
• Whether it’s intuitive for people to put positive things on the left or right. This may sound minor but I found that’s it’s important when getting participants to do a card sorting activity. I naturally gesture for people to put the things they agree with most on the left, but this can be different in different cultures (or just with different people). For example, I found a participant who put the things he liked the most, closest to him and the things he liked the least furthest away.
• Understand the way that people give feedback on a concept may be quite different. Some people and cultures are more direct and used to giving constructive and critical feedback, others are politer and are less likely to be critical of an idea. In general I found Filipinos polite, so I would often ask them to categorise things into buckets of things they ‘really liked’ and ‘only kind of liked’ as I found the feedback richer compared to asking for things they ‘liked’ and ‘didn’t like’.

I needed to understood the relevant demographic groupings of the country to recruit meaningfully

Talking to the right people is a critical part of research. When working in a new country I needed to build an understanding of the relevant demographics to recruit the most representative sample. In the Philippines this meant being sure to recruit Overseas Foreign Workers (OFWs) to ensure that their distinct viewpoint was represented in our research.

Spending extra time writing the interview guide made a big difference to how comfortable I was conducting the interviews

Writing the guide well is critical to ensure interviews meet the research objective. Working in a a new cultural context a few of my learnings included:

• The guide needed to reflect the cultural nuances. For example in the Philippines I made sure not to rush the introductions as often people were very friendly and happy to spend time chatting before getting into the research questions.
• I removed jargon. I used simple clear language, nothing more complicated than necessary.
• In the interview, I spent as little time as possible reading the guide and as much time as possible interacting with the participants. I made sure the guide had clear sections and bold headings that were easy to read at a glance.

I found no matter how well I wrote my guide, I had to ask more clarifying and ‘why’ questions during the interview. I tried not to let my own assumptions and thoughts ‘fill in the gaps’ in a participant’s answer but rather to ask them questions to make sure we had a shared understanding.

Despite my best preparation, sometimes things would still go wrong

I found there were times I had to ask the participant to repeat themselves, or I phrased something a bit confusingly and had to repeat myself. These things happen, but I saw all of them as a learning experience that means the next country I work in I’ll be even better prepared and ready to make new mistakes and learn new lessons.

Ultimately the greatest asset I had was working as part of a multi-cultural and multi-skilled team. They helped with the preparation and answered my questions about cultural norms and practices as well as taking the lead on interviews where the interview participant was most comfortable speaking in Tagalog rather than English.

Conclusion

While the right preparation gave me a good starting point for conducting the research, the important thing to remember was that each interview was with a unique individual whose personality, experiences and story I was there to understand. It’s a great privilege to conduct research in a new country and culture and I am grateful that my job has given me the opportunity to try new things and to learn so much. 

The  views  expressed  in this article are  mine  alone  and  do  not necessarily reflect the views of my employer