Mobile Phone as a Tool for Data Collection in Field Research

The necessity of accurate and timely field data is shared among organizations engaged in fundamentally different activities, public services or commercial operations. Basically, there are three major components in the process of the qualitative research: data collection, interpretation and organization of data, and analytic process. Representative technological advancements in terms of innovation have been made in mobile devices (mobile phone, PDA-s, tablets, laptops, etc). Resources that can be potentially applied on the data collection activity for field researches in order to improve this process. This paper presents and discuss the main features of a mobile phone based solution for field data collection, composed of basically three modules: a survey editor, a server web application and a client mobile application. The data gathering process begins with the survey creation module, which enables the production of tailored questionnaires. The field workforce receives the questionnaire(s) on their mobile phones to collect the interviews responses and sending them back to a server for immediate analysis.

Authors:

• Sandro Mourão
• Karla Okada

Keywords:

• Data Gathering
• Field Research
• Mobile Phone
• Survey.

References:

[1] Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (1998). Basics of qualitative research:
Techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory (2nd ed.).
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
[2] Mack N, Woodsong C, MacQueen K, Guest G, Namey E. Qualitative
Research Methods: A Data Collector's Field Guide. Research Triangle
Park, NC, USA: Family Health International; 2005.
[3] Moe, K; Dwolatzky, B; Olst, R. (2004): Designing a Usable Mobile
Application for Field Data Collection. IEEE AFRICON. Pp. 1187--1192.
[4] Teemu Jalava, Jukka K. Nurminen, "Mobile Phone as an Inspections
Tool-Experiences with a Service for Field Force," ainaw, vol. 2, pp.617-
622, 21st International Conference on Advanced Information
Networking and Applications Workshops (AINAW'07), 2007.
[5] Foundation Human Nature web site:
http://fhnusa.org/projects/ecuador/health.htm.
[6] Nokia Internal Wiki - Data Gathering Project.
[7] Twentyman, Jessica "Usability: Lovely Software. But I can-t work it"
FT.com - Financial Times Published: 17 June 2009.
[8] Zwick, C. Schmitz, B. K├╝hl K. Designing for Small Screens - AVA -
Academia the environment of learning - June 2005 Berlin.
[9] 3GPP TS 23.040 V9.1.0 (2009-09) 3rd Generation Partnership Project;
Technical Specification Group Core Network and Terminals; Technical
realization of the Short Message Service (SMS)(Release 9).