Research in a mobile world

Quant Scale Qual... I thought that sounded more elegant than "Qualnt - the new Quali-Quant". 

With the ability to engage with people via an App on their mobile phone, researchers can do much more than just an 8-question mobile survey or a "traditional" digital ethnography. We can ask people to take pictures, record audio, tag a GPS coordinate, and generally produce mountains of rich, but unwieldy data. 

So we may be trudging towards a new research opportunity and problem: Quant-scale Qual. Maybe a lot of you are already dealing with this. I've seen a lot of quali-quant, but it's usually 200-300 intercepts with some photos and recorded verbatims.

What happens when your diary studies routinely generate 2000 completes? Or maybe they're not "completes", but life blurbs, media micro blogs, or any other new research thing you can invent a name for. Our clients are starting to work through these issues, and companies like Language Logic provide a great starting point with tools that broach predictive/automatic coding and easily handle multimedia data formats.

But multimedia data is a complex beast. It may take Google or Apple to bring us the tools we need to get over the automation hump. For example, check out Google’s face detection technology and iPhoto’s Faces technology.

How this could be licensed, bent, twisted or re-purposed for research is yet to be seen… but the possibilities are exciting and I can't wait to see who solves it first.