By: Meaghan Willis
Market research professionals have traditionally been excluded from qualitative research, and for good reason. They bring methodological awareness, analytic frameworks, and professional bias that could shape how experiences get described. When the goal is representative patient voice, that exclusion makes sense.
But We’ve Been Taking That Convention To Task.
In early-stage or exploratory healthcare research, the goal isn’t always just representation. It’s about understanding the system before asking patients or caregivers to explain their experiences within it, particularly when the focus is not clinical outcomes, but the lived experience of navigating care. In THIS context, the automatic exclusion of market research professionals deserves reconsideration.
This perspective comes from a healthcare-specific pilot initially designed to understand what it feels like to navigate the healthcare system as a patient or caregiver. We began close to home, interviewing colleagues who had lived these experiences across physical and mental health contexts, as patients and as caregivers, using those conversations to surface early patterns in healthcare experience.
We’re not making universal claims. We’re sharing what we learned in a system defined by complexity, fragmentation, and administrative burden, and how having MR professionals in the room changed what we saw.
This Is A Reconsideration, Not A Rebellion
We’re not arguing for a wholesale change to who should be included or excluded in qualitative research, or suggesting that market research professionals should become stand-ins for patients.
We’re Arguing For Intentionality.
In early-stage healthcare research, the exclusion of MR professionals has become automatic, a methodological habit, rather than a choice shaped by research phase and objective.
Reconsidering that habit allows us to use their expertise where it is most valuable: early, when we’re still trying to understand the system itself.
What surprised us was not the themes that emerged, but how much clearer they became when articulated by people trained to recognize and name experience patterns.
Seeing Friction Before It’s Visible
MR professionals don’t just ‘look at the system differently’, they notice patterns others miss. They can spot frictions, tensions and breakdowns across processes, name them clearly and articulate how these points ripple through the system.
In early-stage exploratory healthcare research, that’s GOLD. They connect moments that feel frustrating to patients and caregivers, surface invisible labor, and trace where accountability dissolves across silos.
Including MR professionals as expert respondents doesn’t replace patient or caregiver voices. It surfaces the structural dynamics that shape experience and points to where deeper research should focus.
What Happens When MR Professionals Are Also Patients
In our pilot, we interviewed MR professionals who were also patients and caregivers. Our goal wasn’t to capture representative patient or caregiver experience, but to see what happens when people who know the system from the inside are asked to reflect on their personal encounters with it.
What surfaced wasn’t stronger emotion, it was a different perspective, a system-wide lens applied to personal experience. They could tell their stories like any patient or caregiver, but with an awareness of patterns, friction points, and structural breakdowns that most of us can’t see or articulate.
Their insider lens allowed them to frame their experiences in ways that reveal where the system works, where it strains, and where questions for patients and caregivers should probe deeper.
Why This Matters In Complex Systems Like Healthcare?
Exploratory research has a specific job to do, it’s not providing answers, it’s about clarifying what we’re studying before hypotheses harden and solutions scale.
Healthcare makes that job harder. It’s complex, fragmented, and opaque. Breakdowns are deeply felt but rarely articulated in structural terms.
This is where MR professionals, acting as expert respondents, add value. Not because their experiences are more valid, but because their perspective allows those experiences to be framed in ways that reveal system-level dynamics early.
They don’t replace patients or caregivers. They help us ask better questions of patients and caregivers, earlier.
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