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There is an increasing recognition in the public audit profession that the emergence of big data as well as the growing use of business analytics by audit clients has brought new opportunities and challenges. That is, should more complex business analytics beyond the customary analytical procedures be used in the engagement and if so, where? Which techniques appear to be most promising? This paper starts the process of addressing these questions by examining extant external audit research. 301 papers are identified that discuss some use of analytical procedures in the public audit engagement. These papers are then categorized by technique, engagement phase, and other attributes to facilitate understanding. This analysis of the literature is categorized into an External Audit Analytics (EAA) framework, the objective of which is to identify gaps, to provide motivation for new research, and to classify and outline the main topics addressed in this literature. Specifically, this synthesis organizes audit research, thereby offering guidelines regarding possible future research about approaches for more complex and data driven analytics in the engagement.

This paper aims to examine the use of projective techniques for published marketing and management research in the USA. The paper emphasizes the influence that McClelland, Atkinson, Clark and Lowell's study, The Achievement Motive (1953), has had on subsequent research. That work applied quantitative analysis to responses obtained using projective techniques.

The approaches used in this paper consist of descriptive historical methods and a literature review. The historical analysis was conducted using Kuhn's 1967 conception of paradigms, showing that the paradigm from which projective techniques emerged – psychoanalysis – failed to gather many adherents outside the discipline of psychology. The paradigm failed to gain adherents in US colleges of business, although there are some exceptions. One exception is managerial motivation research, which built on the traditions of The Achievement Motive. The literature review suggests that, despite lacking institutional bases that could be used to develop new adherents to the paradigm, projective techniques were used by a number of researchers, but this research was marginalized, criticized or misunderstood by adherents of the dominant paradigm, positivism.

Some of the criticism directed at projective techniques research by positivists involves criticism of the paradigm's assumption that humans have an unconscious, and a belief that projective techniques are unreliable and invalid. This paper points out that a growing number of cognitive psychologists now accept the existence of an unconscious, and measure it using the “implicit association test.” This paper argues that the IAT is an associational test is the tradition of word association. Moreover, the literature review shows that projective techniques are much more reliable than critics contend, and exhibit greater predictive validity than many positivist instruments.

As with all literature reviews, this one does not include every published research study using projective techniques. As a consequence, the conclusions may not be generalizable to the studies excluded from the analysis.

The paper is one of the few to assemble the literature on projective techniques used in several disciplines, and draw conclusions from these about the applicability of the techniques to market research.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the differences between proactive and reactive market research techniques during the development of new market offerings. The study focused on the financial and innovative performance of traditional market research techniques, such as focus groups and in‐depth interviews, in comparison to more co‐creation‐oriented techniques that are designed to capture customers' value‐in‐use.

The study was a two‐stage process. Study I, an empirical investigation of 195 development projects in European companies, examined how these companies use different market research techniques and how this relates to the profit margins of new products and services. Study II designed an experiment with 50 users of a consumer good and evaluated the contribution of different market research techniques, based on the degree of originality and customer value.

Significant differences were found, in terms of both content and originality, between the technique based on customer co‐creation and the two traditional market research techniques (Study II). These findings can help to explain why the relationship between the use of market research techniques and profit margin (Study I) is stronger for co‐creation techniques than it is for traditional market research techniques.

Despite empirical evidence that the application of market research techniques based on co‐creation can lead to original ideas, there is a lack of valid studies regarding how co‐creation techniques perform in relation to more traditional methods of collaboration with customers.

Properly conceived, conducted and interpreted, motivation research can be an extremely powerful management tool, designed to help the manufacturer or advertiser to sell more goods. Its aim is to expose the market situation, explain it and suggest courses of action which will lead to desired changes. It is a way of looking at a problem rather than a collection of specialist techniques and is strictly practical. Hence it can be used alongside other market research tools for the solution of marketing problems and can be applied to a wide range of business activities. Much of its development has been in the advertising field but it can also help in the formulation of production policy, solving packaging problems and marketing operations. It is examined here in all these contexts. The idea of motivation research, the reasons for its use and the techniques by which to apply it are discussed, as well as the pitfalls that are likely to occur. New and imaginary case studies are used throughout to illustrate points. A review of the subject literature is included.

This paper seeks to investigate the use of projective techniques in Asia‐Pacific markets with particular reference to Taiwan and to compare this with the literature on cultural differences in conducting research to see if any correspondence exists.

The paper is based on a literature review and a small qualitative study of indigenous and expatriate market researchers who work or had recently worked in South Korea, Hong Kong, China, Taiwan and Indonesia.

The paper concludes that the use of projective techniques in Asia‐Pacific can be usefully guided by an understanding of the different cultures there compared with the cultures in the UK and other western markets. It illustrates that projective techniques are as used and are as useful in market research in Asia‐Pacific as they are in the UK.

The research fills a gap in the literature and extends knowledge of how projective techniques are used in Asia‐Pacific markets.

This paper aimed to focus on political marketing and utilised a number of projective techniques to explore the UK Conservative Party’s “brand image” amongst young adults aged 18-24 years. There is little guidance in the extant literature regarding projective technique analysis. Furthermore, there are explicit calls for insight and more understanding into the analytical process. Responding to this identified gap in the literature, this paper provides an illustrative guide that can be used to analyse and interpret findings generated from qualitative projective techniques.

This paper opted for an exploratory study using focus group discussions, combined with qualitative projective techniques. Eight two-hour focus group discussions were conducted with 46 young citizens aged 18-24 years from three locations in England. Focus groups were conducted prior to the 2010 UK General Election. The data from the projective techniques were thematically analysed by the researcher.

This research provides insight into the broad process used to analyse and interpret the qualitative projective expressions in relation to the UK Conservative Party’s brand image from the perspective of young adults. Furthermore, this paper highlights that projective techniques can provide an insight into underlying feelings and deep-seated attitudes towards political parties, candidates and the positive and negative aspects of brand image.

Several limitations became apparent at the end of this study. As this is a qualitative study, findings cannot be generalisable to the wider population. Additionally, it is important to note that the researcher had limited experience of conducting focus group discussions combined with projective techniques, and this can be considered a limitation. Nevertheless, the researcher did attend professional “effective depth interviewing” training delivered by the “Marketing Research Society” before data collection. This goes some way in addressing this limitation.

This paper provides an illustrative guide and insight into the analytical process that can be used to analyse and interpret findings generated from qualitative projective techniques. This can be used by academics with little experience of projective techniques. Furthermore, this framework may be useful for practitioners such as marketers, political parties and candidates to explore and analyse the external image of other political brands. The elicitation ability of qualitative projective techniques facilitates greater expressive insight that may remain hidden if traditional direct data collection tools such as interviews and questionnaires are used.

This paper provides some understanding into how to analyse subjective meaning such as feelings, attitudes, perceptions and associations revealed through projective techniques. Furthermore, projective techniques can provide access to the private conscious and unconscious inner-world of the participant. They allow respondents to express themselves with greater detail and discussion compared with direct questioning. This research, therefore, presents greater insight in managing and analysing expressions generated from this non-intrusive approach that can encourage open disclosure with less hesitancy, verbally less demanding and suitable to overcome emotional, language and cultural barriers.

This paper adds to the under-researched and undefined practice of analysing projective expressions by providing an illustrative process to interpret and understand insight generated from qualitative projective techniques. Thus, answers the explicit calls for detailed guidance in this area of research. This was achieved by critically reviewing and adapting the approaches taken by Boddy, 2005, Butler-Kisber, 2010 and Hofstede et al., 2007 and incorporating them into a pragmatic systematic framework. This research could be used as a foundation for future studies and a point of reference for people with limited knowledge of projective technique analysis.

This paper outlines a variety of the research on student attrition and recognises some of the sensitivities that may be involved for some students in dealing with dropping out of university. This paper claims that because of these sensibilities, some student’s responses to direct questions about the reasons for attrition may be biased by social desirability. The purpose of this paper is to get beyond social desirability bias to examine a fuller range of reasons for student retention and attrition.

In an exploratory investigation, this research study uses a projective technique which helps to circumvent the conscious defences of respondents. The projective technique is based on the “thematic apperception test” and uses a “bubble drawing” to elicit emotional and more socially undesirable responses.

All first-year students appear to consider leaving university, and emotional considerations involving loneliness and homesickness are much more prominent than most quantitative studies acknowledge. For example, in this research, social concerns are twice as prominent as financial concerns, whereas in past survey research, financial concerns have been identified as most prominent.

To retain students, universities need to provide new students with real care and support, especially in their first few weeks at university. To study retention comprehensively, researchers need to go beyond the confines of positivist research.

This is the first study that uses a projective technique to investigate student retention and attrition. By going beyond a merely positivist approach to research, a fuller, deeper and more complete understanding of the wide extent and profound nature of the emotional issues involved in student attrition and retention is gained.

The Delphi technique is used to achieve consensus among experts and/or gain judgment on complex matters. This paper aims to discuss the classical Delphi and its advantages and disadvantages in qualitative research, particularly in hospitality.

The classical Delphi is characterized by the involvement of experts and its iterative nature. In an industry with high turnover and limited pools of specialist expertise this can lead to problems of attrition and management of the process. The paper presents two qualitative hospitality research case studies in which the classical Delphi is successfully modified to overcome its limitations.

Identifying potential problems early in the research process enables critical design decisions to be made. Case one used a parallel expert group with similar experience to develop a research instrument for a limited number of prestigious experts well‐acquainted with one another who might have reached specious consensus through channels not accessible to the researcher. Case two enabled the addition of new experts to an expert panel to overcome attrition in successive Delphi rounds.

Despite its growing popularity in social science, Delphi has rarely been used in qualitative hospitality research. The modifications suggested in this paper can enhance the robustness of the classical Delphi technique for qualitative hospitality research.

The paper shows how the classical Delphi technique can be successfully modified for use in qualitative hospitality research.

Introduction Operations research, i.e. the application of scientific methodology to operational problems in the search for improved understanding and control, can be said to have started with the application of mathematical tools to military problems of supply bombing and strategy, during the Second World War. Post‐war these tools were applied to business problems, particularly production scheduling, inventory control and physical distribution because of the acute shortages of goods and the numerical aspects of these problems.

The purpose of this paper is to argue for the reflective use of visual techniques in qualitative inter-viewing and suggests using visuals not only as projective techniques to elicit answers, but also as facilitation techniques throughout the interview process.

By reflecting on their own research projects in organization and management studies, the authors develop a practical approach to visual interviewing – making use of both projective and facilitation techniques. The paper concludes by discussing the limitations of visualization techniques, and suggesting directions for future research on visually enhanced interviewing.

The integration of projective and facilitation techniques enables the interviewer to build rapport with the respondent(s), and to elicit deeper answers by providing cognitive stimulation. In the course of the interview, such an integrative approach brings along further advantages, most notably focusing attention, maintaining interaction, and fostering the co-construction of knowledge between the interviewer and the interviewee(s).

This paper is reflective of what is currently occurring in the field of qualitative interviewing, and presents a practical approach for the integration of visual projection and facilitation in qualitative interviews.