Progress or Regress: Where Is Qual Going?

Last week I attended QUAL360 in Washington, DC, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The intimate setting at Gallup HQ made for a comfortable and engaging atmosphere. Good conversation, great dinners. And being two blocks from the White House added an extra layer of energy and significance to the event.

What surprised me most was that, as a social intelligence guy, I didn't feel like an outsider. Social media research has become mainstream. By my count, 57% of the talks featured social as an insight source. Even more telling, the two most important platforms today, Reddit and TikTok, were both presenting.

Listening is everywhere. Intelligence is rare.

Social listening is now a staple in the everyday research mix. It's often used at the front end to identify trending topics or sprinkled into reports for a few supporting quotes. But I saw little that I would call substantive, rigorous, or truly qualitative. This was underscored by how casually the terms "social listening" and "social intelligence" were used interchangeably. To me, intelligence is about going beyond the obvious.

More broadly, qualitative research seems to be at a crossroads. The most honest talk, in my view, came from Conveo, which aims to scale qualitative research by running many simultaneous chats with participants and delivering quant-like data. This reflects the underlying theme I sensed throughout the conference: that if qualitative research gets big enough, it can become quant.

But size alone doesn't equate to understanding. Tacit knowledge doesn't fit neatly into a spreadsheet. This isn't a rejection of tech, I use it all day, but automation doesn't replace deep interpretation, layered meaning, and human intuition. Qual requires years of training because it's a discipline, a way of seeing. Tech makes sense when it's rooted in human truths. Otherwise, it's just eye candy.

We need a qualitative minimum

I left feeling that our industry needs a new standard, an intellectual, qualitative minimum, that safeguards against:

Oversimplification by immature automation.
The encroachment of management consultants eating our cake.
The erosion of the prestige clients need to justify our fees.

Mediocre at scale is still just mediocre. People haven't become less complex since the 90s, but if you sit through some of these presentations, you might think so. The opposite is true. We are heading into complex times.

We need a standard that creates clarity without simplifying complexity for the sake of a polished slide deck. At Bakamo, we believe that every quote reflects a human life. It deserves to be understood as such.