The rheingold interview

The heart of our morphological research projects

The rheingold interview is the heart of our morphological research and much more than a normal in-depth interview. In a two-hour exploration each, the unconscious mental efficacies and influencing factors that determine the behavior of consumers or consumers are uncovered. With often surprising results.

The experienced reality is often hidden under deeper layers

What people pass off as their opinion in interviews is always the end product of an unconscious processing procedure. In the deeper layers, however, lies a psychological reality that determines our actions and is often clearly different from the quickly expressed opinion. The rheingold interview paves the way to this knowledge. With the morphological in-depth interview, we have developed and constantly refined an instrument for our impact research that gives a complete picture of the experience and behavior of consumers and recipients.

In either individual or group explorations, people are encouraged to describe in their own words everything that comes to mind in connection with the topic. The interview becomes a joint research journey: In a process that is constantly deepening, all otherwise buried or not consciously perceived contexts to individually attributed meanings are explored.

The in-depth interview allows for free exploration, yet provides core anchors

The morphological in-depth interview is the central methodological instrument because it does not restrict insight collection to predetermined questions and categories. On the other hand, the in-depth interview is not a completely free exploration. The execution is subject to explicit rules and and builds on the knowledge of the theoretical background.

The psychological description provides a framework forthe collected insights to be further sifted,evaluated and contextualized. The objective is to identify a structure underlying all phenomena and to reveal the interplay of the impacting factors. Through further contextual analysis steps, descriptorsand functional models are applied and finally unified into the finished product - the reporting of results.

Due to the pandemic, we increasingly switched to digital video interviews. Although we noticed some disadvantages of online explorations, there were also many advantages.

Paul Bremer explains what these are in this interview: