Transcript

A mobile diary study is a longitudinal qualitative research methodology where recruited research participants keep a diary of their behaviors over a period of time.

How to conduct a mobile Diary Study Project?

So running a mobile diary study is really easy. You recruit participants as you normally would for a focus group or an IDI for example and then what the respondents do is they’re using an app like Indeemo to record how they behave in the moment over a period of time. So you know from a consumer perspective that could be photographs of every beverage they consume over a week. It could be a repetitive video diary study of how they prepare meals every evening for a week. It could be screen recordings of how they shop online.

What are the Benefits of a Mobile Diary Study?

There are several real benefits to them in fact, so the first one is they’re highly contextual so the research participant is using a smartphone app and the data capture is taking place in their everyday context so it’s very very rich and raw in terms of giving you a periscope into what’s really going on in their lives.

The second benefit is that the data capture is in the moment okay so it’s not post-rationalized, the respondents are showing you with pictures or videos what they’re doing in the moment so it’s really really close to the reality of what’s actually happening. And as a result it can be very authentic in terms of helping you spot habits, rituals or routines.

It’s longitudinal, so I think this is actually a superpower so it takes place over a period of time, it’s an asynchronous quality of the research methodology which mean that respondents are repetitively showing you how they behave in their everyday context over a period of days, so, unlike other methodologies where you might be with them for 90 minutes or 2 hours and you just get this kind of narrow lens into their lives.

The research takes place much longer over a much longer period of time with diary studies and the beauty of that is you get to capture repetitive behaviors. So if you know over a period of seven days on a breakfast consumption study for example, they’re showing you that they’re having a certain type of cereal every day that’s the truth because you get to capture it once and it gets proven through repetitive data capture.

Who can use Mobile Diary Studies?

So Mobile Diary Studies are really easy to activate, and flexible methodology and they can be used in any industry or sector so you know “week in the life” consumption diaries for consumer brands. You know daily live user diaries for user experience researchers or designers. We do a lot of patient diaries or our hcp diaries for healthcare brands and that’s particularly important when it comes to pharmaceuticals for example.

And the other power of this especially in the time that we are in, is that you can carry out these diary studies anywhere in any market from any location so it’s fully remote, it’s contactless and it enables researchers based anywhere to engage with respondents in any location at any time.

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