How to Ruin a Discussion Guide and Jeopardize Your Study Outcome

According to my blog statistics, the post describing how to create a discussion guide is read daily. Consider this post as an addendum. It is written in the spirit of “endarkenment”, a useful technique when you want to expose common errors and things not to do.

I chose to use a sarcastic tone to be amusing. However, in truth, all of these suggestions of what not to do come from actual experience.

How to Ruin a Discussion Guide and Jeopardize Your Study Outcome

• Make sure that the discussion guide is at least 10 pages long… 20 pages is even better.
• Predict every possible answer a respondent might make and include follow up questions for all eventualities, no matter how remote.
• Use a dense narrative writing style and a paragraph format that makes it impossible to scan or read at a glance.
• Make sure that every topic is covered, even the unimportant ones.
• When in doubt put the same question in multiple times, just to be sure that it gets covered.
• Make sure that there are far more questions than can possibly be covered in the time allotted for each interview or group.
• During the development process continually change the basic premises of the research such as the stimuli, questioning approach and even the study objectives.
• Make sure that every question and sentence in the discussion guide is perfectly phrased, grammatically correct, properly punctuated and includes trademark symbols where appropriate.
• Finally, make a few superficial wording changes to the guide and hand it to the moderator as a group or interview begins. Tell them to use this new copy, that contains changes and to throw away the one that he or she carefully annotated while preparing for the study. Importantly, don’t tell them what was changed. Let them figure that out on the fly.

I am sure that anyone wanting to sabotage a study will find this information helpful. however, if any of  these ideas sound like fun to you, please DON’T call me!