Community-led mobile research–What could it look like?

Adam Groves, Head of Programs at On Our Radar, gave a presentation at MERL Tech London in February where he elaborated on a new method for collecting qualitative ethnographic data remotely.

The problem On Our Radar sought to confront, Adam declares, is the cold and impenetrable bureaucratic machinery of complex organizations. To many people, the unresponsiveness and inhumanity of the bureaucracies that provide them with services is dispiriting, and this is a challenge to overcome for anyone that wants to provide a quality service.

On Our Radar’s solution is to enable people to share their real-time experiences of services by recording audio and SMS diaries with their basic mobile phones. Because of the intimacy they capture, these first-person accounts have the capacity to grab the people behind services and make them listen to and experience the customer’s thoughts and feelings as they happened.

Responses obtained from audio and SMS diaries are different from those obtained from other qualitative data collection methods because, unlike solutions that crowdsource feedback, these diaries contain responses from a small group of trained citizen reporters that share their experiences in these diaries over a sustained period of time. The product is a rich and textured insight into the reporters’ emotions and priorities. One can track their journeys through services and across systems.

On Our Radar worked with British Telecom (BT) to implement this technique. The objective was to help BT understand how their customers with dementia experience their services. Over a few weeks, forty people living with dementia recorded audio diaries about their experiences dealing with big companies.

Adam explained how the audio diary method was effective for this project:

• Because diaries and dialogues are in real time, they captured emotional highs and lows (such as the anxiety of picking up the phone and making a call) that would not be recalled in post fact interviews.
• Because diaries are focused on individuals and their journeys instead of on discrete interactions with specific services, they showed how encountering seemingly unrelated organizations or relationships impacted users’ experiences of BT. For example, cold calls became terrifying for people with dementia and made them reluctant to answer the phone for anyone.
• Because this method follows people’s experiences over time, it allows researchers to place individual pain points and problems in the context of a broader experience.
• Because the data is in first person and in the moment, it moved people emotionally. Data was shared with call center staff and managers, and they found it compelling. It was an emotional human story told in one’s own words. It invited decision makers to walk in other people’s shoes.

On Our Radar’s future projects include working in Sierra Leone with local researchers to understand how households are changing their practices post-Ebola and a major piece of research with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in Malaysia and the Philippines to gain insight on people’s understanding of their health systems.

For more, find a video of Adam’s original presentation below!