Interviewing senior people makes us well prepared. When I conducted a one-on-one interview with a woman around 65, I had to be in the interview room well in advance. Then, I prepared my mind for good listening and good observation. “Your respondent is here. Are you ready?” A receptionist told me 10 minutes before the appointment time. When the woman sat down in the interview room, she politely bowed and gave me a prepared smile. In this way, we began our interview with a senior woman.
Important, but Harder to Gain Insights
Interviewing senior women gives us opportunities to explore and gain profound, rich insights into their daily lives. They have taken care of households: cooking, housekeeping, and raising children. They have managed the family’s finances by controlling the purse strings, too. Their experiences today can also give us ideas about how our products and services should be for senior people. But to understand senior people, we cannot use the same research methods used for young people. The chronological aging of older adults contributes to physical weakness and memory loss. Also, their attitudes and communication styles do not straightforwardly tell us their honest thoughts.
Conscious of Others
When we research senior women, several challenges make it difficult to understand their insights. One of them is their self-consciousness. Senior women tend to avoid giving negative feedback directly or soften the way they say it. In a group interview, they are careful about what they say. Although the interviewer encourages participants to speak frankly, they constantly check others’ reactions. Of course, we observe similar self-conscious behaviors among young Japanese, too. Compared to young people, however, older people have attitudes of caring for others so as not to disrupt harmony with others.
Holding Back and Self-Criticism
We sometimes observe that senior women hesitate to try new things. Some people try them, but give them up because they cannot see things clearly with long-sighted eyes and cannot manipulate objects with their weakened muscles. The increase in body immobility leads them to lower their self-confidence.
We also observe that some people blame themselves when they are not able to use new things. For example, when a senior woman could not follow a product’s usage instructions, she apologized, saying, “I am sorry, I cannot use it with my ability,” instead of saying, “The usage instruction is bad.” Such self-criticism makes it difficult for us to determine which improvements to products and services are necessary to make them usable. We need to dive deep into what drives their self-criticism as we listen to them, rather than just recording what they say.
Memory Decline
Another age-related issue is declining memory. Generally, older people do not remember their experiences as accurately as younger people do. For example, some people have trouble recalling product names they used in the past year. Others fail to recall the names of TV commercial stars. When we conduct interviews, we must double-check what they said using supplemental materials and ask the same questions in different ways or as confirmatory questions.
How to Gain Insights – Visit, Listen and Observe
Then, what should we do? We can develop creative research techniques suitable for deep-dive insights into senior people. One useful approach is ethnography: visiting them, listening to their stories, and observing their environment. Although it is not easy to secure home visit opportunities, the home visit interviews provide rich insights into senior women’s lifestyles. For example, when we visited a 70-year-old woman to interview her about her toilet goods, she hesitated to speak about them. But we soon discovered that the toilet goods perfectly fitted the layout of the house. During the interview, the woman recalled something. “Uh, wait a minute. I have something to show you.” She went to another room and came back with one item to tell us a story about her toilet goods.
Gaining consumer insights is not easy. But it is a fun experience for researchers, product designers, and business developers to hunt for consumer insights.