The Futures Company

Josh Hunt writes:

As researchers, we are beholden to consumers in many ways, not least their willingness to expend time and effort to talk to us about how and what they think about things. Given that we are frequently reminded that consumers are time-poor, less and less willing to give personal information to strange people and keen to maintain privacy, one might think that nobody would ever take part in any research.

Yet I was struck in a recent project both by how willing people were to spend an hour and a half talking candidly about their plans for the future to a total stranger, and that in many cases people were delighted (and even grateful) to have had the opportunity to reflect on and consider the direction of their lives.

While I am not espousing some grim research-as-therapy model, I think we sometimes underestimate how much people like talking about themselves, how rare it is to have access to a non-judgmental listener, and how little the ‘time-starved’ spend sitting back and thinking. Perhaps research, for some people, is a way getting back some of that much-valued time.

Image with thanks to Polder