Accounting for Politeness in Healthcare Market Research
Summary
Did you know that what sounds like praise could actually be a disguised critique? In qualitative research, respondents may soften of hide their true meaning to protect “face.” Understanding communicative politeness strategies helps researchers interpret feedback more accurately rather than just taking it at face value.
Check out this quick video for Brendon O'Connor that explains politeness theory and why it matters.
Transcript
Hi! I’m Brendon O’Connor, a Senior Language Analyst at inVibe. Today, I’d like to talk a bit about the role of politeness in the context of market research, and why it’s important for researchers to account for it when analyzing qualitative data.
In the field of linguistics, politeness theory centers something called “face,” which can be loosely thought of as an individual’s sense of self-value, self-image, and agency. And when we’re being polite, we’re aiming to avoid challenging or threatening the face of others on one—or both—of two dimensions: “positive face” and “negative face.”
Positive Face is an individual’s need for their wishes and desires to be appreciated in a social context. When we’re speaking, we appeal to a listener’s positive face using a strategy called Positive Politeness, wherein our aim is to convey a sense of friendliness or camaraderie. Illustrating this with an example, imagine we have a respondent who is concerned about offending the creator of an ad concept that they’re evaluating. In this scenario, the respondent might embed any criticism they have within a compliment. As an example of how this might sound, the respondent might say something like: “I really like what you did with Concept X, and I think Concept Y would benefit from a similar approach.” Here, the core implication is actually: ‘I like Concept X and dislike Concept Y the way it currently is.’
The other dimension of politeness is Negative Face, which is an individual’s desire to feel as though they have freedom of action without imposition and the right to make their own decisions. When we’re speaking to someone, we appeal to their negative face using Negative Politeness, where the goal is to minimize perceptions of our own language being forceful or demanding by being indirect, non-assumptive, and non-coercive. Using another example, imagine that an HCP is reacting to a data release. They find it too preliminary to be impactful but want to convey that without insulting the study authors. To do this, they might offer positively framed feedback full of hedge words like “perhaps,” “might,” “can,” or “could.” As an example of how this might sound, the HCP might say something like: “These outcomes could be really promising” or “This data might suggest an advantage of X over Y” Once again, the true implication the speaker’s positive framing is a criticism of the data, specifically that it’s too preliminary to draw any conclusions about it. So, when using either positive or negative politeness, a speaker’s delivery may leave a listener feeling positive while the true meaning of what they’ve said is actually the opposite. So, when conducting market research, anticipating politeness conventions and peeling them away as necessary often provides a clearer view of the data and allows an analyst to more accurate in their characterizations of what respondents mean when they provide feedback. Thanks for your time, and I hope this gave you a good sense for the framework of politeness and its implications in the analysis of qualitative data.