Qualitative Research & Behavioural Insights

The limitations of quantitative research can often be addressed through innovative and insightful approaches on the qualitative front.

We integrate qualitative inquiry with behavioural science and mixed-methods research to understand the decisions, experiences, and constraints that shape how people interact with policies, programmes, and public services — insights that are often essential to interpreting quantitative findings correctly and designing interventions that actually fit people’s lives.

Our qualitative toolkit includes in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, ethnographic fieldwork, case study research, and participatory methods that involve communities directly in generating and interpreting evidence. We select methods based on the research question at hand: understanding why uptake of a service is low may call for a different approach than understanding how households cope with an economic shock, or how frontline workers experience the implementation of a new policy.

Behavioural science is a distinct but complementary strand of this work. We draw on behavioural economics and psychology to understand the cognitive and social factors — present bias, social norms, limited attention, trust — that shape decision-making, and we apply this understanding both diagnostically, to explain why a programme is or isn’t achieving uptake or behaviour change, and generatively, to design and test low-cost behavioural interventions (“nudges”) that can improve programme effectiveness.

The real strength of this work lies in integration rather than addition. We design mixed-methods studies where qualitative and quantitative strands are built to speak to each other from the outset — qualitative work that explains mechanisms behind a quantitative effect, or informs the design of a quantitative instrument, or investigates unexpected findings from an impact evaluation. This is different from simply appending a few interviews to a survey-based study; it requires designing the qualitative component to answer specific questions the quantitative data cannot.

This work is particularly valuable early in a programme’s life, where qualitative and behavioural insight can inform intervention design before resources are committed to a specific approach, as well as alongside impact evaluations, where it can explain not just whether an intervention worked but the human mechanisms behind that result.