What is it about?
Patompong Sirachairat’s work focuses on how to develop a rigorous qualitative interview guide for exploring artificial intelligence (AI) integration in marketing among micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs). The chapter does not simply present an interview questionnaire. It demonstrates a systematic process for designing an interview guide that can capture entrepreneurs’ lived experiences, perceptions, decision-making, and responses to AI as they emerge in practice. A grounded-theory–informed approach was used so that the research would not impose predetermined theoretical explanations on participants. Instead, the interview guide was designed to provide sufficient structure to ensure conceptual coverage while allowing new and unexpected insights to emerge from entrepreneurs’ experiences. The development process incorporated established interview-design frameworks, expert validation through Item–Objective Congruence (IOC), ethical review, and procedures to strengthen research trustworthiness. The result is a rigorous and replicable approach to developing qualitative research instruments for studying AI-enabled business practices in an environment where the underlying technology, managerial practices, and theoretical explanations are still evolving.
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Why is it important?
Researching emerging technologies such as AI presents a particular methodological challenge: researchers need to capture new and evolving business practices without forcing them into theoretical categories that may no longer fully reflect what is happening in practice. Patompong’s work addresses this challenge by focusing on something fundamental but often underexplored—the systematic development of the qualitative interview instrument itself. The chapter demonstrates how a grounded-theory–informed interview guide can be developed with methodological rigor while remaining sufficiently open to unexpected insights. Its combination of structured instrument development, established interview-question typologies, expert validation, ethical review, and trustworthiness procedures provides a transparent and replicable process for qualitative researchers. This makes the work relevant beyond AI marketing or MSMEs. It offers a practical methodological reference for researchers investigating other emerging phenomena where established theories are still developing and where the quality of the research instrument can determine the quality of the insights that emerge from the field.
Perspectives
Patompong’s work reflects an important methodological challenge in researching AI and business: when a phenomenon is evolving rapidly, established theories may not yet fully capture what is happening in practice. Rather than forcing entrepreneurs’ experiences into predetermined theoretical categories, the work takes a grounded-theory–informed approach to developing an interview instrument that creates space for new insights to emerge from the field. What makes this work particularly meaningful is its emphasis on the research instrument itself. Careful attention to conceptual coherence, expert validation, ethical considerations, and trustworthiness provides a rigorous foundation for exploring how MSME entrepreneurs perceive, navigate, and integrate AI into their marketing practices. More broadly, the work highlights an important principle for research on emerging phenomena: when reality is evolving faster than theory, the quality of the questions we ask becomes fundamental to the quality of the knowledge we create.
Manoj Chatpibal
King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Ladkrabang
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Developing a Grounded-Theory Qualitative Research Instruments to Explore MSME Perspectives on AI Integration in Marketing, January 2026, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-032-27860-9_14.
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