Prayag Narula on AI’s Role in Qualitative Research

Prayag Narula is the founder and CEO of Marvin, a tool for qualitative researchers. Prayag will also be a speaker at the Advancing Research Conference where he’ll share the stage with Rida Qadri, a research scientist at Google. Humans have been doing quantitative research for thousands of years – well, for as long as math has been around. Qualitative research, on the other hand, is fairly new to human history, emerging only in the 20th Century. And qualitative research has taken a backseat to what Prayag calls “the tyranny of math,” the prevailing attitude that if research is not math-based, it’s not valid. But that doesn’t diminish the importance of qualitative data. Decisions at all levels are made based on qualitative data every day. Here are some characteristics of qualitative research: • Qualitative research is scientific and has been used in the social sciences for scientific discovery for six decades. • Qualitative data is highly variable and semi-structured, so creating software for it has enormous challenges. • Taking notes and asking questions are inherent parts of qualitative research, and tools that can search and synthesize such data can dramatically enhance productivity and outcomes. It’s time for qualitative research to be given its due. Enter Marvin. Software not only gives validity and legitimacy to qualitative research, it makes it more useful. Marvin uses AI to add context to the conversation and to help with analysis. The tool is free for individuals and teams of two researchers. Prayag is excited about the use of open AI and ChatGBT. He’s not worried about these tools replacing researchers, but they do give researchers another data point, that is, what AI can glean from the data. AI can help us find patterns that we didn’t see before or might give an interpretation of the data or ask a question that hadn’t been previously considered. With tools like Marvin, it’s an exciting time to be in research. What you’ll learn from this episode • How software brings legitimacy to proc