What to call 'people' in research?

I was prompted to write this post after participating in an analysis session where some of the people who had taken part in the research were referred to as ‘ethnos’. Whilst I’m all for ethnography, it’s hard not to smile when people are referred to as ‘ethnos’. No offense Matt+John as I love your research but I’m not mad keen on the term ‘ethnos’.

But it does open up that old dilemma about what to call people in qualitative research. Quant is simpler. People are percentages, standard variables or ‘outliers’. In qualitative research they are just people, but that sounds far too ordinary in an industry which values its own creative intelligence rather more than the down to earth chumminess which is part and parcel of the qualitative process.

When I started work in a qualitative agency mainly involved in advertising and branding work, reports were generally written referring to people as ‘respondents’. The word ‘respondents’ works when people are responding to storyboards or branding concepts. I feel it is often how focus groups attendees like to see themselves (as sort of powerful guinea pigs). However it is rather passive and doesn’t really work when people are co-creating policy solutions or describing oral histories.

People are called different things at different times and by different people in a project. All fieldwork companies call people ‘respondents’ (almost as annoying as their habit of encapsulating everything as ‘market research’). During the analysis phase of a project people are often referred to by researchers by their actual names – though I am sometimes uncomfortable with this for confidentiality reasons. I had a colleague once who always wrote reports calling people ‘consumers’ – even for social research clients.

A common loophole in this dilemma and one I use myself is to term people on a project by project basis. A recent report I wrote looking at people in war torn countries made extensive use of the term ‘civilians’. Though cumbersome, the term ‘children and young people’ is common enough in research reports. For social research there is always the catch all term ‘service-user’.

Opinion Leader has a habit or referring to people as ‘participants’. Emotionally this is my favourite term because of its inclusive tone. It matches the atmosphere of some of the larger events they convene. I sometimes extend this to ‘research participant’ as I feel it gives people a stake in the process without implying they are involved in the analysis or report writing process, which generally they are not.

I quite often fall back on the term ‘interviewee’. It’s bog standard. It’s not pretty. But it’s true.

Comments

[Trevor Godman]

I'm a proper quant researcher, but I still prefer not to call them respondents. I try not to think about them as part of a research process but as people in the context of the subject I'm researching. So I tend to use 'consumers' most often or 'customers' - based on the kinds of work I do most often. You could use 'citizens', 'patients', 'mum's' depending on the topics.

And sometimes, I just talk about them as 'people' ....

[Gillian Thomas]

I think we need to invent better collective noun for research participants! something along the lines of pride of lions, murder of crows etc..