Being a moderator

March 31st, 2006 Filed under English entries, Work

@ 2006-03-31 19:51

This night, for the first time I try to be a moderator. Moderator is a job title in my company.

Do you know what moderator is? Well, if you have ever been invited to be in a discussion with some other consumers by a market research company, then you know who is the moderator. It’s the man (or woman) who led the discussion. But if you ever participated in such kinda activities, it’s normal that you don’t know what is moderator’s work like.

Just as some of you know, I work for an market research company. You must have heard ACNielsen and we are of the same kind, they are our rival. Research within market research area in been divided into QUANTITATIVE Research and QUALITATIVE Research. Quantitative is doing with objective things, that mean facts and data. Every result from quantitative research should have support of data. While qualitative research is mainly focus on digging out the reason behind the facts and data. Say, if the quantitative work found that 55% of the consumers like spicy tasted toothpaste, then the qualitative work is to discover why some people like spicy while the others don’t. Maybe they like eat spicy food or maybe the spicy can fresh them. Qualitative must find them out.

As there is quantitative research and qualitative research, so there is quantitative researchers and the counterparts. In most of the past time I only doing quantitative related work, but today I have by chance to be a moderator – a work should be categorized into qualitative.

So what I was doing as a moderator?
We invited 4 consumers with cars to our office and my work is to have chat with them all together – we call this chat Focus Group. The chat is designed to find out their consuming behavior in after sales auto market. You must know that I’m introvert and not good at talking with ease and confidence. So, when I was put into a room with 4 totally strangers, if not at work, I would be silent till the meeting break up. But I was on work, so I was forced to be a moderator – to chat with them and to lead the chat.

My fault is that I will be nervous when something challenging going to happen to me. I would lose my appetite if I am nervous, so that’s the case today. But, my virtue is that I can control my nervous, even I am very nervous I can make myself appears calm. So, tonight, after began my first sentences in tremble I soon get into relax state. I thought the 3 man and 1 woman were just like my friends and it should be easy to chat with friends. The only different is that this time I will get some certain information from them. On such a consideration, the chat went on very smooth. If your relaxed then your dialogist would be relaxed.

The focus group is a success. It makes me more confident when chatting with others and make me more confident when doing my quantitative research. ’cause I know I can do more that I’m doing