It was no coincidence that the Royal Society was the chosen venue for the International Journal of Market Research's first Research Methods Forum. Since 1660, this venerable institution has devoted itself to furthering progress and understanding in the physical sciences. It was high time, felt the organisers of the day, that the social sciences should strive for the same sort of certainties and universal acceptance.

Social sciences, however – and, in particular, the efficacy of many of the research methods on which they rely – are under increasing pressure. Technological change, social change, consumer change, cultural change and the complex (and itself changing) interplay between them have caused major questions to be asked of the social researcher’s traditional toolkit.

In the commercial field, those asking the questions are hard to ignore. It was, as the day's chairman Peter Mouncey reminded the audience in his opening remarks, a senior Procter & Gamble executive who predicted that “the consumer research industry as we know it will be on life support by 2012”. And it was an opposite number from Unilever, the other lead paymaster of consumer market research, who revealed that “I don’t know if we are going to have a choice but to move away from survey research.”

Add to that a couple of other factual twists of the knife from Mouncey, including MRS data from as long as 12 years ago reporting that almost a quarter of respondents did not enjoy participating in research, and the scene for the day was set.

But, as the proceedings unfolded, was the case for change as strong as the

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