How to Augment Your Online Qualitative Research with Mobile Ethnography
In an era of accelerating digital transformation, where businesses are digitising at 16x their previous speed, we believe that next year, brands will be drowning in more data than they've ever had. This is going to raise more questions than answers, and brands will need qualitative research more than ever to figure out the ‘new normal’.
Doctors are not meeting their patients face to face as much. We’re not eating out as much. We’re not in store as much. We’re not at work as much. And when it comes to qualitative research, for now, we’re not meeting our research participants as much.
But every business is in the same boat and to survive and succeed in the new normal, it’s time for qualitative research to also digitise and evolve.
What is Mobile Ethnography ?
Mobile ethnography [What is Mobile Ethnography?] is one of the fastest growing and evolving online qualitative research methodologies that has emerged in recent years, and might just be the tool you need to digitise your current research offering.
This mobile based, autoethnographic research methodology allows researchers to connect with respondents remotely via a native mobile app installed on their smartphones. The results can be instantly analysed via a browser based platform. The digital first approach completely removes the need for travel and eliminates the need for face to face research, thus mitigating health and safety challenges (in Covid times). This agile methodology also allows researchers to connect with respondents and moderators across the globe, making multi market or complex studies easily accessible.
So, what’s the recipe for successfully combining Mobile Ethnography with other qualitative research approaches like online IDI’s and Focus Groups?
It’s actually easier than you think.
The Similarities
You recruit as you always did for focus groups or IDIs.
You screen respondents the same way.
You ideally talk to the respondents during the screener.
You incentive the same amount as you would for Focus Groups or IDIs.
The Differences
You design tasks and activities that enable them to show you what they do instead of telling you what they think they do.
You get to observe their conscious and unconscious responses allowing for an authentic insight.
Mobile Ethnography helps respondents to asynchronously record their behaviours over a period of days. It allows them to record repetitive behaviours over time, in their everyday context offering the researcher a periscope into their lives, be in access to their homes or workplaces.
It also gives you another perspective of life: one that’s captured when there’s no one else in the room enabling the respondent to be themselves - helping to ensure authenticity that can be lacking in other research settings. No more need for recall.
It also helps you to explore and to capture contextual, repetitive human behaviour. You can still use your follow up IDIs or Focus Group to probe and to tease out more details. Nothing helps two humans connect better than being in the same room. Nothing will ever get people to open up and be truly vulnerable like looking them in the face.
Mobile Ethnography A Credible Alternative to In Person Research?
In an era when face to face contact is no longer possible, combining Mobile ethnography with online Focus Groups or Zoom IDIs gets you very very close to an inperson experience, in a way that is safe, private and doesn’t require any travel. And when the status quo benchmark is big data and analytics, then there is no comparison.
Brands need qualitative research more than ever.
Summary
To connect in the new normal you need a new approach. Based on what our clients are now routinely telling us, the best way to do that is to supercharge your online IDIs and focus groups with Mobile Ethnography.
By connecting with your respondents and getting to know them ahead of your focus group, you can ask more insightful and personalised questions, thus allowing for a more open and honest conversation, diving deeper into the motivations behind the actions.
A large healthcare client of ours told me last week that they’ve never had more data i.e. they have more data than what they know to do with. That’s not their problem. Their problem is that they are missing the “why”.
That’s why we believe that, in this digital first, omni-channel remote, new normal, Qualitative Research will never be in more demand.
At Indeemo, we’ve been pioneering remote, digital transformation in research since 2016. Our experienced team of strategists are standing by right now to help you evolve your research for the ‘new normal’.
Not only do we provide you with a category leading platform, but we also help you brainstorm approaches, design your tasking, plan your research, figure out recruitment, train you, and set up your online qualitative research project in a matter of days.
It's quick to activate and extremely cost-effective and it’s disruptively impactful.
Get in touch now and we will get back to you ASAP to set up a quick call.
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