An Overview of Mobile Ethnography

Mobile Ethnography

Mobile Ethnography has become a bit of a buzzword lately and a lot of end clients are requesting more mobile or digital approaches in their research briefs. 

The approach has become more popular in recent months with more widespread adoption and a growth in the number of use cases. The coronavirus has significantly impacted the ability of online qualitative researchers to conduct focus groups and to undertake in-person research, leading increasing numbers of researchers to utilise more novel approaches like Mobile Ethnography. This short blog provides more detail as to what Mobile Ethnography is and outlines why it can ensure researchers can continue to generate rich insights without having to be physically present with respondents.

Traditional Ethnography

Before we start talking about mobile ethnography, we feel it’s important to share some context on ethnography and qualitative research in general and put a timeline together that explains the evolution of this methodology and why it is gaining popularity amongst the research community.

Traditional ethnography is a qualitative research methodology which involves observation by an in-field researcher who is physically present with the person or group of people being studied for a while. Its origins can be traced to Malinowski's fieldwork among Trobriand Islanders in 1914. With its roots in social anthropology, ethnography originally involved the recording and analysis of a culture or society over several months resulting in a written account of observed behaviors and customs.

Ethnography has since evolved from its cultural and societal roots to a more modern definition that loosely encapsulates any in-field observation undertaken by a researcher to better understand how a person or group of people behave in a particular context. Modern-day examples can include an in-store researcher observing from a distance how a person goes about their shopping trip or a researcher visiting a family at mealtime to understand how they prepare a meal in their kitchen.

Given the fact that traditional, in-person ethnography tends to be time-consuming and expensive, it is a research methodology that has historically been perceived as being within the budgets of very few brands and as a result, brands and researchers have tended to “brand” ethnography as expensive and not scalable. Consequently, brands have preferred to rely on in-depth-interviews and focus groups as a more cost-effective and scalable remote qualitative research methodology.

In-Depth-Interviews & Focus Groups

However, while “seeing” their customer in a focus group might reassure the end client that they understand and know their customer, focus groups and In Depth Interviews have their unique pros and cons and there are inherent limitations with these traditional research methods.

In-depth interviews (IDI’s) involve researchers sitting down one-on-one with respondents either at a central location or on-site. IDI’s can be time-consuming and costly, especially if the researcher needs to travel from their office to meet the respondent. Given the short time frame of a typical IDI (one to two hours), there is a limited time window for the researcher to get a true reflection of how the respondents typically behave in context and in the moment. Although less time consuming than in-depth interviews, focus groups typically tend to take place at a central location which means that the respondents are “out of context”. Furthermore, discussions related to past events which can result in post-rationalization on the part of respondents and there is the added complication of group bias where respondents might not say what they ‘really’ feel given their desire to not go against the opinions of the group as groupthink takes hold.

Focus Groups

Pretty much everyone is familiar with the concept of a focus group with 6-8 people sitting around a table talking to a researcher while the end client looks on ‘FBI style’ from the other side of a black mirror.

Focus Groups or In-depth-interviews (IDIs) typically involve the researcher being physically present with a respondent or respondents at a ‘central location’ (i.e. a dedicated interview room, lab or sometimes a hotel meeting room) so that the researcher can discuss and probe respondent behaviors and feelings to the research topic in question. The benefit for the end client was that they could observe the interview (either through the black mirror or via live-streamed video) and see for themselves what the respondents were thinking and saying. They are also quick to conduct and relatively cost-effective.

Pros & Cons of Traditional Ethnography

The researcher will observe and record how the respondent’s home or work environment is organised and arranged and can glean a lot of information and understanding from this without ever mentioning the same to the respondent. It is undoubtedly a methodology that enables researchers to get a richer, contextual understanding of the respondent they are studying.

Despite these benefits, however, traditional ethnographic research has some significant limitations:

1/ Expense: it can be time-consuming and expensive to get researchers to drive or even fly to the respondent’s location.

2/ Time Consuming: it can take a significant amount of time to collate and process data captured in-field.

3/ Limited Sample Size: given the expense and time required, sample sizes remain quite small given the budget constraints of all but the most highly funded clients.

4/ The ‘Researcher Effect’: the intrusive presence of the researcher may result in a change of behavior of the respondent resulting in non-typical behaviors being observed.

The Coronavirus outbreak has served to bring some of these drawbacks sharply into focus, as travel bans and social distancing has meant that in-person research has been more challenging than usual.

Fast forward to the era of the connected smartphone and many of the limitations of traditional ethnographic research can now be overcome by mobile ethnography resulting in a significant increase in demand from end clients to be able to better observe how respondents ‘really’ behave, in-context and in-the-moment.

Digital Ethnography now enables clients and researchers to be able to undertake ethnographic research at a speed and scale that was never previously, physically or financially achievable.

How Mobile Ethnography Works?

Mobile ethnography utilizes an App installed on the respondent’s smartphone that enables respondents to record their everyday lives concerning the topic of research being undertaken.

By using videos, photos with captions or text to capture how the respondents behave, act or feel in context and in-the-moment, researchers get a more authentic, realistic, media-rich understanding of the everyday lives of the respondents.

The user experience for respondents is simple and fun. Well designed mobile ethnography apps that adopt a social networking / messaging style user experience are instantly familiar to respondents and provide a frictionless experience that enables them to quickly capture moments and to share them with the researcher.

The immediacy and contextuality of the data capture removes any potential for post rationalization. Furthermore, as the researcher is not present and the respondent is recording how they behave, on their own, in their every-day context, the behaviors and feelings that are captured using mobile ethnography are highly authentic and do not contain the potential distortions possible due to the ‘researcher effect’ as described previously.

Researchers who use mobile ethnography consistently tell us that the self-recorded behaviors captured in the familiar context of the respondent’s everyday lives are more intimate, authentic and revealing than any other data collection technique that the researchers have utilised before.