Research Tips

Availability Bias

One of the real strengths of qualitative research is that it can provide very vivid and memorable examples of people’s attitudes, experiences, etc. However, this can come with a downside: the tendency to believe those experiences are more common than they really are.

Because particular examples elicited through qualitative research are often very memorable, they come to mind easily. That’s great if a decision maker is trying to understand the nature of a problem or opportunity, but it tends to bias frequency estimates. This bias is called availability bias because certain examples are more available in memory than others.

Gathering quantitative data when frequency estimates are required helps ensure that availability bias does not influence estimates.