Why we created this App.

Imagine…….. going on an ethnographic fieldwork assignment with a selection of your brightest colleagues, specialist consultants, a client or two and even an assistant to help you manage and digest your notes and findings..

The EverydayLives process has been honed over the last 14 years into a methodology which is popular with clients and respondents alike. It is inclusive, collaborative and allows rich insights, subject to the quality of the collaboration and thinking taking place.

A guiding principle of our process is the naturalistic capture or recording of everyday life events, happenings, conversations and happenings. We do not conduct interviews and in many cases, we don’t even tell respondents what we are interested in learning about when we follow the about their everyday lives.

In parallel to honing our process we have also  strived to find ways of making our way of doing things as cost effective and efficient as possible – with limited success. Let us explain…

Here follows the EverydayLives process:

1. On being commissioned, we have a kick off meeting with our client to agree objectives, themes and, critically, a ‘must capture’ list of key events without which our objectives cannot be met.
2. We begin recruitment. We insist on pen portraits for each respondent (as well as the completed screener)  so clients can give final sign off based on not just a questionnaire.
3. Fieldwork begins. Usually this means one ethnographic film maker spending between 1 and 3 days with a subject wherever they go and whatever they do from dawn ‘til dusk. We typicall record 4-6 hours of footage per day – not all is or seems usable.
4. A Question Generation Workshop takes place after the first few household days have been completed. The workshop is attended by both client and agency side (including advertising, media, etc.) colleagues and takes around a day. The purpose of the QGW is for all concerned to watch the roughly edited films, no interviews yet, and come up with questions they would like to put to respondents. Some may be specific to a household and others to all of the households. An important output being questions we have never though of asking before and emerging themes percolating to the surface  by which we will be able to organise and interpret/add meaning to our data.
5. A conversational guide is created following the QGW for client to approve.
6. Each subject is revisited and participate in a co-discovery. They are shown films of themselves – the very same one show in the QGW – and asked to a) narrate them and b) when an opportunity arises, to explore topics and themes outlined in the conversational guide.
7. Now follows a number of weeks of parallel analysis, interpretation, film editing and dubbing of recorded co-discovery sessions to specific sections of film.
8. The final deliverable is a two phase workshop starting with themed insights each supported by short clips from across some or all of the subjects. The final phase is a moderated implication finding workshop where the learning’s, insights and meanings from phase 1 are translated, with clients, in breakout groups, into next step actions for the team.

Our challenge was to create an app which could shorten the timescale and therefore cost of the above process while retain as much of its richness and collaborative underpinning. And in achieving this, enable qualitative researchers who are unwilling or unable to use cameras and editing software  to conduct their own ethnographic explorations too.