Mike Owen, Jon Chandler
CONTEXT RESEARCH
Brighton 1986
QUALIS INTERNATIONAL
QUALIS INTERNATIONAL
QUALIS INTERNATIONAL
QUALIS INTERNATIONAL  
The Role of Gaming Techniques in Understanding Decision Processes

Appropriate research tools are vital for research that goes beyond the mundane and ordinary. Distinctive analytic tools are crucial for ensuring that research output and recommendations are powerful. Distinctive methodological tools are vital for creating research data which is richer, more insight and more penetrating.

This paper was originally presented to the annual conference of the Market Research Society in 1986 and won the award for best paper that year. The paper explains and explores the operation of a new range of qualitative research methodologies built around ''gaming'' principles.

The idea of a ''decision process'' is an artificial and misleading description of much of what goes on in the real world. The very concept of a ''decision process'' implies a linear-sequential thinking through of a problem. Most decisions in the real world are not made like this. Actual decisions are arrived at through an array of thoughts and events, both big and small, all of which can contribute to an end outcome or deflect from it.

''Gaming Techniques'' comprise a range of different approaches which all attempt to exploit people?s ability to play. The core principle of gaming techniques is the recreation of real world events as if they were game scenarios. Gaming techniques help in identifying some of the crucial but less rational events which really do impact on the cars that people buy, the pensions they take out, the universities they choose or the services they select.