A study is only as good as the questions it starts from.
Interviews and surveys go deep on the questions you bring. Discovery finds the ones you did not bring. It runs first, before the discussion guide and the questionnaire are written.
Two phases.
Phase one
Discovery
Ours.
What we do
We collect what people say to each other about your category, over months or years, in forums, communities, reviews and comment threads. We keep reading until new sources stop adding anything new.
What we look for
Where the conversation differs from the assumptions in your brief. A group you had not counted. A meaning the category does not use. A word people use that your questionnaire does not.
What you receive
The Question Set. It holds what we found, the vocabulary people use, and the questions it raises for your qualitative and quantitative work.
Phase two
Measurement
Yours, your agency's or ours.
What happens
The questions go into interviews, a survey or a tracker.
What it adds
Size, proportion and behaviour, which reading conversation cannot give.
Who does it
Your insight team, your research agency, or Bakamo's own quantitative team.
Researchers call this an exploratory sequential design: qualitative discovery builds the instrument, and quantitative work measures. What we change is the material for the first phase.
What each kind of research is for.
Discovery (Bakamo)
Interviews and groups
Survey
Starts from
What people already say to each other
Your discussion guide
Your questionnaire
Best at
Finding what nobody asked about
Depth on a question you bring
Size and proportion
Cannot
Size it, or test what does not exist yet
Return a topic the guide did not open
Return an answer you did not list
You leave with
Questions
Explanations
Numbers
Where the method comes from.
Finding and testing are different jobs, and research has long treated them separately. Our method belongs to the finding side.
Charles S. Peirceabduction
You meet a surprising fact and reason to the explanation that would make it unsurprising. Peirce held that this is the step that brings in a new idea.
John Tukeyexploratory analysis
Look at the material before you hold a hypothesis, to see what is there.
Glaser and Straussgrounded theory
Categories come out of the material. They are not set in advance.
Kenneth Pikeemic and etic
The categories people use themselves differ from the researcher's. We report the first kind.
Hans-Georg Gadamerhermeneutics
Reading is interpretation, and interpretation needs a trained reader.
Medicine works the same way. A clinical trial measures the effects its designers chose in advance. Effects nobody anticipated are found later, in reports from doctors and patients, and then go back into a study.
Our social theory
The thinking behind our methodology.
Our methodology is an argument made of other people's ideas. It holds for every study we have run, with or without The Reading Machine. These are the sixteen thinkers it leans on, who shaped whom, and what each one gives the work.
The discourse, as we read it.
Who taught whom, who argued, and where ideas rhyme across traditions. Hover a name to see its corner of the web; click it to read about the thinker.
taughtinfluencedworked togetherargued againstrhyme — a conceptual echo, not a lineage
The thinkers.
Click a portrait to read what each one saw, what our method takes from it, and why it makes us more sure.
Sketches, not likenesses.
Two ways to work with us.
Option A
Discovery for your study
We deliver the Question Set. Your team or your agency runs the interviews and the survey.
Option B
Discovery and survey
We deliver the Question Set, then build and field the survey and report the results.