Live conversation
A live conversation, in research, is a synchronous exchange in which a participant and an interviewer or moderator respond to each other in real time, by phone, video, chat or in person, so every answer can shape the next question.
How it works
What makes a conversation live is responsiveness. The interviewer hears an answer and decides, in the moment, whether to probe, clarify, move on or return to something said earlier. That adaptability is why live interviews produce richer data than a fixed questionnaire: an unexpected comment can become the most important thread of the session.
Asynchronous methods, such as recorded responses or bulletin boards, give participants flexibility but lose this back-and-forth, since follow-up arrives hours later if at all, after the participant has moved on. In return, Saarijärvi and Bratt note, participants in email interviews get more time to reflect before answering.
A worked example
Customers who downgraded a phone plan get the same question two ways. On a static form, 19 of 30 answer "too expensive". In live interviews with 12 others, the first mentions that the plan's included streaming service was news to her, so the interviewer asks the remaining 11 about it, and 7 turn out to have been paying for that service separately.
Related
Automate this in Pulse
Because a Pulse interview is spoken and answered in real time, the moderator can take up a correction a participant makes halfway through a sentence, the back-and-forth that separates a live conversation from a form.