Why Is the Backward Research Method So Effective?
Applied psychologists and marketers in particular conduct research to choose one action over another. Through their research, market researchers want to answer questions such as:
"What price should we charge for the product? Which customer segments should we target? and Which advertisement will consumers find most appealing?"
Similarly, educational researchers have questions regarding the effectiveness of a particular instruction method, and organizational psychologists may want to study how different incentive structures affect the performance of employees. For such applied research, the main criterion of success lies in actionability – how well findings from the research can be used to make a decision on how to act.
This goal is different from academic psychological research which generates basic knowledge, or deeper understanding regarding a particular phenomenon, without consideration of the finding’s actionability or solving particular problems.
In this post, my focus is on applied research. I want to discuss how the traditional applied research process works, and why it often fails to produce actionable results. The backward research method, developed by Professor Alan Andreasen, turns the traditional research process on its head, solving its main weaknesses and forcing the decision maker and researcher to think about what specific results will be obtained and how they will be used in the beginning. Because of this up-front work requiring deliberation, more reliable, actionable outcomes are ultimately obtained. So far, it has been used mainly by market researchers, but any applied psychological researcher will benefit from designing research the “backward” way.
About the Author
Utpal Dholakia
Utpal Dholakia is the George R. Brown Professor of Marketing at the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business, Rice University in Houston, Texas. He has a master's degree in psychology, and a Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Michigan, a master's degree in operations research from the Ohio State University, and a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering from the University of Bombay.
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