QRCA Views Fall 2011 : Page 43
capturing their daily lives on Facebook. Many post pleasant musings, like praise for a favorite restaurant or movie. It is common for people to share more intimate moments in their lives, includ-ing videos highlighting a growing child’s accomplishments. Many also share more introspective reflections, like their latest views on work-life balance. This increas-ing comfort with personal transpar-ency online has afforded qualitative researchers a new method for gathering deep and rich information about per-sonal routines and emotions. This comfort with transparency is not restricted, however, to just the online environment. Rather, it extends into the mobile environment. It is staggering to realize that 98% of Americans have a mobile phone (many with picture/SMS and video capability), 30% of which are smartphones with email and web-surfing capabilities. This functionality allows people to capture and share what is happening in their lives from wherever they are — and in an increasingly media-rich way. Newqual platform providers in the past year have sought to tap into this trend by allowing researchers to leverage the range of communication technol-ogies on mobile devices — SMS, MMS, video, email, web-based, app-based and voicemail. With the permeation of technologies that encourage us to capture and share our lives, evolving the traditional qualitative research diary to follow these trends seems not only natural but also essential. online diaries Among the newqual diary formats, online diaries are the most popular. Online diaries, which sprang from per-sonal blogs, pre-date the other new-qual formats. Online diaries are a good choice when there is a long series of specific questions for each entry (i.e., too tedi-ous to answer by audio, mobile or video). They also are appropriate when there is a need to capture imagery (such as photos and online images) with the written entry. Online diaries are usually set up in one of two ways, with the researcher providing either (1) one or two sen-tences of direction that allow partici-pants to elaborate and share as much or as little as they would like or (2) a specific set of questions to answer for each diary entry. Either way can be effective, depending upon the diary objectives. In the former, participants write their blog entry from memory, ideally on the same day that the event occurred. This is less taxing for the participant, but it often lacks consistent details across entries and across participants. In the latter format (a specific set of questions), participants can be provided with note-taking pages that are print-outs of the online questions, and they can be asked to record their answers “in the moment.” Participants later transfer these notes to the online site. Online diaries are the one newqual format in which the old pen and paper are still a handy aid to data collection, and they facilitate the capturing of more details and improve the accuracy and consistency of responses. A successful application of an online diary we exe-cuted was studying wine-drinking occa-sions, where participants showed us a varied range of those moments over two weeks. They took a photo of each occasion, provided an emotional image to capture feelings in the moment and answered a series of questions detailing the who, what, where, when, etc. Both the photos and emotional images illu-minated the rituals and motivations for the wine moments, fulfilling the desired level of detail for the client. Video diaries For decades, qualitative ethnogra-phic researchers have video-recorded QUALITATIVE RESEARCH CONSULTANTS ASSOCIATION 43
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