Mobile Ethnography White Paper
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Using Mobile Diary Studies to Understand Children's In-Home Technology Use
Context
As we have moved into the digital age, technology has become entrenched in our everyday lives. The rapid pace of digitalization has been hard to keep pace with, and the most mundane of tasks have increasingly been automated; nowadays there really is an app for almost everything.
Not only have adults become reliant and comfortable with new technologies, but the children born of recent years are now the first truly digital-natives, having been completely immersed in technology from day one. Whilst there is much talk around the negative effects of ‘screen-time’, children use everything from iPads to digital learning aids and toys on a daily basis.
The Challenge
Our client had been approached by a technology brand that wanted to get a deeper insight into children's use of technology in the home. To understand children’s technology use meant that they needed to get rich insights from the real-life context in which children were using tech. From digital baby mobiles to Kids TV and Streaming shows, they wanted to see every touchpoint a sample of kids interacted with, within the confines of their own homes.
But getting these in-the-moment insights was difficult for several reasons.
Firstly, recruiting children to studies had obvious challenges. Privacy is always of utmost importance to all of our clients, especially when it comes to minors. This requires parental consent and can significantly increase the time needed to recruit.
Additionally, getting insights directly from the homes of children made the challenge even greater. The home is very much a sacred and private space for most. This makes gaining access to the home difficult, but it also has other obstacles. Embedding an observer or ethnographer in the context of someone’s home is almost certain to alter natural behaviors and impact the authenticity of the respondents’ insights (without even considering the impressionable nature of children!).
The Goals
Understand children's use of technology in the context of the home
Gain an insight into the types of technology children use every day
Understand the feelings and behaviors of children by technology use
The Solution
We proposed a one-week Diary Study as the best way to gain an understanding of how children were interacting with technology. By keeping the fieldwork to one week, we agreed that it would be easier to keep parents engaged when it came to recording their children. As anyone with kids will appreciate, it is a full-time job. Asking them to engage more frequently than once a week was likely to overburden them and consequently dilute the data.
Our client also agreed that an All-at-Once task List would give parents the flexibility to complete the tasks as various contexts, moments and situations occurred over the week. This flexibility would be crucial in capturing the most intimate and seemingly inconsequential moments that would truly inform the research.
How Indeemo Helped?
Our client identified 2 separate cohorts of children that they needed to observe for the purpose of their project; Households with one child, and households with more than one child.
Having recruited over 50 parents that met the requirements of each target group, the client then assigned each with 3 separate tasks. The first task would introduce the family and the second would involve recording the children’s in-the-moment tech usage throughout the week.
Finally, the third task required each parent to reflect on what they had learned about their children's technology use throughout the week.
The always-on nature of our Respondents Apps meant that parents were able to capture moments in seconds, bringing real authenticity to the data.
The Outcome
Throughout the week, our client received over 350, media-rich, authentic and in-the-moment posts of children using technology in the home.
Interacting with respondents using push-notifications, they were able to further probe the various pieces of technology that they were using. Observations included:
Seeing what YouTube channel was popular
Seeing how the child navigated to it of their own free will
Seeing what type of device the user played with
Seeing how long they engaged with it
All of these insights gave our client an unprecedented insight into the lives of children in the home.
Seeing the context was critical. Due to resourcing and privacy issues, this qualitative data was previously unattainable to our client. Mobile Ethnography offered a new, flexible and powerful solution to their problem
Summary & Conclusion
These uploads captured every moment from young children using iPads to watch cartoons before school, through to school-going children using laptops to do homework, right through to older children and young teenagers using streaming-services on smart-TVs. Not alone did the uploads give extremely rich visual insights into the environments that technology was being used in, but they also gave our client a much better window as to how the children interacted with technology in their own homes.
Contact us
If you’d like to know more about how Indeemo can help you understand children’s usage of technology, please get in touch to learn more.
