Why Mobile Ethnography Belongs in Your Research Toolkit (Full Transcript)

[00:00:04] Speaker 1: Hey friends, Catherine here from Research Rockstar, and I'm here today to talk about a fun topic, which is I recently got to do a case study of a mobile ethnography platform, and I'm eager to share some of my key takeaways. But first I'd like to kind of connect this to the conversation that we've been having in many of the episodes of this series recently, which is talking about what are hiring managers looking for? If you're in the market research and insights space, and you're thinking about career advancement or making your next career move, then you definitely want to know what hiring managers are looking for. And those of you who've been following along with this series know that I've been doing an analysis, I've been doing some periodic analyses, roughly every two to three months or so over the last couple of years, where I analyze thousands and thousands of job postings related to market research insights so that we can really understand what are the hiring managers looking for. I don't want to speculate about what skills people are hiring for, I want to actually have real data that says, okay, these are the key themes. And one of the key themes that comes up is a lot of hiring managers are looking for professionals who are comfortable finding, evaluating, and potentially deploying new methodologies. It's a really strong recurring theme in my analysis of thousands of job postings, where they really do want people who aren't just about surveys and focus groups. No offense to people who choose to specialize in those areas, you know, surveys and focus groups are still a really important part of our tool chest, but these days, by any way of measuring it or categorizing it, there are at least 12 different types of methods that we can routinely use for quantitative or qualitative research applications. So a lot of hiring managers are looking for people who are innovative or who can help their teams advance to new methodologies. So if that's something that is of interest to you, then one question is, what's that new methodology going to be? What's the next methodology you're going to add to your tool chest? So if you feel that it is time for you to refresh your tool chest, one of the challenges you may have is, how do I find time to evaluate new things, right? It's really hard. Many of us who work in market research and insights work on projects. And so we're working on multiple projects, we're juggling deadlines, we're juggling suppliers and clients and budgets and more. It's really hard in that type of work environment to make the time for things like trying new methods. One of the things that's interesting is, some of you may actually work on a team that does make that part of your process. And if you do, that is fantastic. For example, the folks at Unilever have reported that over a two-year period, they piloted, not just evaluated, but they piloted over 175 new insights-related tools. But of course, Unilever is a $60 billion company, right? So not all of us have the luxury of being able to actually dedicate staff and team members to be able to do that. So I'm thrilled that Unilever does, because sometimes they talk about their pilots and they share some of this information publicly, which is very generous of them. But for most of us, it's just not reality. In fact, when I talk to a lot of folks these days, they tell me they're lucky if they get to try two new platforms or methodologies in a given year. And if 175 seems crazy, well, Unilever is clearly an outlier, but still very inspirational. So the question for most of us mere mortals is, how do I find the time to check out new methodologies and which ones should I choose, right? Because there are a lot of options. And so one of the things that I've been trying to do with the other instructors here at Research Rockstar is we've been trying to incorporate more hands-on platform work or demonstrations into all of our Research Rockstar courses. So some of you who take our courses may have started to notice that, and you'll definitely be seeing more of that over the next few months as we refresh some of our existing courses. But still, how are you going to do it? So if you can take training, that includes checking out new methodologies, fantastic. And also for those of you who are just looking to try things, a lot of the companies that offer new methodologies and new platforms do offer free trials. So you can get your hands a little dirty, so you can kind of try it before you buy it kind of thing. But I also hear from people who say, I do the free trials, but then I know I'm going to get like 50 sales calls after that, and I just don't want to deal with it. I get it. So in addition to trying to incorporate more of this product evaluation and demonstrations into our Research Rockstar courses, I'm also going to periodically work with some of our other researchers here to publish case studies. And first up is on mobile ethnography. So mobile ethnography is something that I've actually been exposed to for a few years now in a few different ways. I've evaluated some of the different tools that are out there. I've read their case studies. I've looked at, you know, real time and stored demonstrations. But I'd never personally gotten a chance to hands-on do a pilot study. So the mobile ethnography platform that I chose for this study is Indemo. And Indemo, they were great. First of all, they gave us the opportunity, myself and the other researchers on the team, they gave us training, they gave us access to their platform for the purpose of doing the pilot study. So I really do want to thank the folks at Indemo. And I wanted to share with you what it kind of looks like from the researcher point of view. So as with all of the mobile ethnography methodology platforms that are out there, from the researcher point of view, you're going to have some form of dashboard where you can see the qualitative responses coming in. Now from the participant point of view, for them, it's app-based. So they download an app, and it's on their smartphone. And that app takes advantage of being able to enter text responses or numeric responses or take pictures or take videos as ways of participating in this qualitative research exercise. For the case study that my team and I did, we did, we recruited 10 college students for our pilot study. And we ran the qualitative study for seven days. And so over the course of that seven days, there were certain things that our participants were asked to do every day. For example, we were studying their study behaviors. So we wanted to study study behaviors. We wanted to see, you know, how college students study, where their distractions are, that sort of thing. That's what we were looking to do a lot of exploration of. And so here's what the dashboard looked on one particular day. And what you can see here is I've got a lot of different types of data, right? I've got text responses. I've got stills, right, still images, photographs people took of where they were when they were studying or what was on their screen. I also have video responses. So I've got a lot of unstructured data here. I've got text. I've got image. I've got video. And as a researcher, I love this, right? I just felt like I got so much wonderful feedback and so much data that I could work with. Of course, it's unstructured data. And one of the things you can see here in this screenshot is within DEMO, I could add in little notes or tags, which would then allow me to filter the results later. So that as I was getting responses in, I could put in tags. And this was sort of like, you know, my coding process for this particular study. So I gathered a lot of really rich information. And of course, there's a moderation capability too. And if you can, I don't know how clearly you can see this image for those of you who are watching on YouTube versus listening on the podcast. But for those of you who are watching, you'll see that there are some moderator comments. And then the people who are participating would respond to the moderators. So moderation is always an important part of any qualitative research study, especially online qualitative. So having it be something where, you know, people were not only engaging with the app, but they were actually engaging with the moderators was really exciting for me. So again, I'm able to collect a lot of information from the dashboard so that I'm really on a, you know, multiple times a day, I could pop in and see how things were going and see how the responses were coming in. So at a high level, after doing the Indemo case study, and also my experiences doing demonstrations with other platforms, my feeling is that mobile ethnography is definitely something that you should be considering if you're thinking about what methodology should I try next. You know, what should I be adding to my tool chest? Again, especially for those of you who are thinking about career advancement and wanting to show that you do know things more than surveys and focus groups and in-depth interviews. So my takeaways, four of my key takeaways are about why mobile ethnography is definitely something that professional qualitative researchers can benefit from. So first of all, there's a scalability benefit. Whether I want to do qualitative research with 20 people or even 100 or more, mobile ethnography platforms deliver. They can handle a scalable qualitative scope of research. And to me, that's really exciting because, you know, scalability and qualitative research has always been a challenge, right? It gets extremely expensive and extremely time-consuming. But with this, with mobile ethnography, I can reach a lot of people fairly quickly and without the expense of a physical moderator actually one-to-one moderating everything face-to-face. So very cool for me in terms of scalability. Suitability is another issue. Have you ever thought that it's getting harder to reach great authentic respondents for qualitative research? You know, people who do survey research, we've been complaining on the survey research side for years that it gets increasingly difficult to, you know, to find authentic people to take surveys, right? Response rates for surveys have plummeted over the last 10 years. Well, qualitative research is no picnic either. Finding authentic people to participate in a meaningful way in qualitative research is really difficult. And you may be doing research with populations that frankly are becoming very hard to reach or recruit for in-depth interviews or focus groups. So this is another way to reach those folks. Now maybe part of it is a novelty appeal. I'm not really sure. Certainly with our college group, it was very easy to recruit people and their engagement was really high. So sure, we sometimes had to send out some reminders, but it really wasn't onerous. I actually found that the college students engaged with the platform really well. Is that because they're college students? Well, I can't say for sure that's not the case, but it seems to me that, you know, there are, what, over 2 billion people around the world with smartphones in their pockets. That seems to me like a lot of people who have a device handy, and it's a device they like, right? They like interacting with their phone. So sure, college students seem like a slam-dunk population for an app-based methodology, but I certainly don't think they're the only one. Again, think about 2 billion people have smartphones. Sounds like a lot of people really love smartphones, right? A third benefit I do want to mention is manageability. As with any form of qualitative research, we know that moderation is important. And I was a little bit nervous because even though with our case study, you know, we had a small group, still taking time to do moderation can be challenging. And what I found, for example, with the Indemo platform is they had some really cool features that allowed me to very quickly identify who was falling behind on compliance, you know, who was not participating enough, or who was slow on participation. So I can easily find them and send them, you know, little gentle nudges and encouragement, engage with them a little bit more. And that really helped, you know, especially if you're talking about at scale. You know, if you're using mobile ethnography to do a study with 50 or more participants, having features that allow you to quickly identify who needs, you know, who of your participant base needs a little extra love is an awesome thing. It was super easy for me to do with the Indemo platform. Availability is the fourth key benefit I want to talk about today, which is the availability of these platforms is really fantastic. You have options. Our case study was done with Indemo. However, there are also options available from 2020 Research, D-Scout, Mind Swarms, and Over the Shoulder. And I imagine there will be some other ones coming out soon, right? It's a hot area. I'm sure there's going to be more competition. But the point is, is that you have right now at least six different, excuse me, at least five different options for conducting mobile ethnography. So it is something that's super available. And again, a lot of these companies will give you either, you know, a free demonstration, certainly, but some of them will also give you a free trial or free pilot. So, you know, ask about it. You may be able to get a pilot for a fairly low cost. In our case study, you know, what we found was that we had some out-of-pocket expenses because of course you do have to pay incentives, right? So there were some incentive expenses, but the cost of doing the case study was really very affordable. So again, if you're thinking about a new methodology, I encourage you to give mobile ethnography a try. Again, especially for those of you who are working on qualitative studies where you really want discovery at scale. I love that about mobile ethnography. Now, there's a lot more details I can get into here, including the debate of, well, if people are doing self-ethnography, is that really ethnography? And what are some of the other things I should know before deploying something like this? So I created a four-page review based on the case study and additional information from my past experience with demonstrations of other tools. That case study document is available as a download, and you can get that at researchrockstar.com slash mobile ethnography. So that's researchrockstar.com slash mobile ethnography and mobile spelled M-O-B-I-L-E, ethnography, all one word. So please check it out and let me know if you find that to be useful. And finally, before I close today, I just want to say thank you. This is our 52nd episode of Conversations for Research Rockstars. I can't believe it. So it has been a year, so this is our one-year anniversary. I want to thank everybody who has helped make this a possibility. First of all, on my own team, I just want to thank Tony, who has been great about supporting this and making sure that this is happening and then distributing the information to our followers. I also want to thank Alejandro for all of his work taking the podcast or taking the YouTube audio and turning it into a podcast for me every week and making sure that the podcast stays current as well. And to everybody who's provided feedback and encouragement as I've gone through the process of learning how to do YouTube stuff and podcast stuff, thank you. I appreciate all of the kind words and all of the feedback. And I want to thank everybody by offering a discount code on the Research Rockstar website. So for those of you who are interested in taking training courses with Research Rockstar, either our real-time or our on-demand courses, for our celebration, I created a thank-you code, OneYear100. So the number one, the word year, and the number 100, enter that on the Training.ResearchRockstar.com website if you're interested in any of the courses, and that will give you $100 off any of our programs. And that does expire on Monday, June 18th. So enjoy that discount code, OneYear100, to help us celebrate our one-year anniversary. And thank you again so much for everybody who's been part of this. Don't forget to subscribe, and I'll look forward to seeing you next week. Thanks everyone.