Research data is collected and analyzed through quantitative methods, yet the manner in which the questions are presented share similarities used within qualitative methods. Participants respond to questions offering perceived choice. The participants’ choice is reflective of their psychological characteristics. This perceived choice (presented throughout the research method) is designed to score a participant and categorize that participant according to their respective score. The categories (psychographic profiles) used to assign people, reflect personality characteristics which the researchers can analyze and use for their particular purposes.
Psychographic filtering and collaborative filtering are still within experimental stages and therefore have been not been extensively used.5 The techniques are most effective when they are used to indicate preference for a single, constant item (i.e. a horror book written by one author) rather than recommending a composition of characteristics (i.e. a newspaper article on war) which varies in perspective from publisher to publisher.6 For the item to be perceived in accordance with the psychographic profile, it must be defined within a specific category, opposed to being encompassing of many categories (where many preferences overlap).7 Major problems with this type of research are whether it can be applied to items which are constantly changing in scope and updated regularly and whether people will participate sufficiently to create psychographic profiles.
Haag et al., Management Information Systems: For the Information Age. Canada: McGraw Hill-Ryerson, 2006 ↩
(2006) Answers http://www.answers.com/topic/psychography-1 ↩
Sonja Kangas, Collaborative Filtering and Recommendation Systems [Electronic resource] Finland: VTT Information Technology, 2002 [1] http://www.vtt.fi/inf/julkaisut/muut/2002/collaborativefiltering.pdf ↩