Qualitative research
Qualitative research seeks to understand how people interpret a situation, which arguments they use and which experiences shape their opinions. At Afiches we conduct it through AI-assisted in-depth interviews, which allows us to work with much larger samples than usual.
01What it is
Whereas quantitative research estimates how many people hold a view, qualitative research looks at how and why they hold it. Its classic techniques are the in-depth interview and the focus group, and its main output is a set of interpretive categories built from participants’ own discourse.
The main limitation of these techniques is scale: each interview takes an interviewer’s and an analyst’s time, which limits the number of cases and makes segment comparisons difficult. Afiches addresses this with AI-led in-depth interviews within a survey, probing each person’s concrete experience.
Analysis combines AI-assisted thematic coding with review by the team. Beyond identifying themes, we look at how they connect: in the Afiches comparative security study, for example, this approach distinguished narratives centered on social decline in Argentina and Uruguay from narratives centered on organized crime and corruption in Mexico and Honduras.
02When to use it
- Exploring a new topic before designing a survey.
- Understanding motivations, barriers and user experiences.
- Analyzing discourse, narratives and interpretive frames.
- Assessing how a message, campaign or public policy is received.
- Comparing segments or countries with enough cases in each.
03How we work
- Discussion guideWe define the research themes and the open-ended questions that explore them.
- Participant selectionWe recruit specific profiles through targeted ads and screening questions.
- InterviewsThe AI conducts the interviews and follows up on what each person raises.
- Thematic analysisWe code the themes, review the quotes and analyze how they relate.
- Interpretive reportWe present the findings with verbatim quotes and their relative weight in each segment.
04What we deliver
- Map of themes and narratives with verbatim quotes.
- Relative weight of each theme by segment.
- Full interview transcripts.
- Interpretive report with conclusions and recommendations.
05Questions
How many interviews can you run?
Because interviews run in parallel, the number depends on the audience and budget rather than fieldwork time. Studies with hundreds of cases are common.
Does it work for regional studies?
Yes. The same guide is applied across countries, which makes narratives easy to compare.
How is it different from a focus group?
A focus group captures interaction between participants; individual interviews explore each person’s experience without group influence and with many more cases.
Tell us what you want to measure and we’ll put together a proposal.
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