In many of the presentations I’ve given over the last few years about what compelled us to build Mobile Researcher, I run through some of the common difficulties faced by organisations in conducting field research – be it for randomised intervention studies, commercial market research or any other data collection task.

Somewhat obviously, the challenges differ somewhat depending on the nature of the data collection exercise but, in general, there is a great deal of commonality.  In a series of discussions on the challenges of paper-based field research, I’ll use the scenario whereby a fieldworker interviews a respondent to collect the necessary information (interviewer administered survey).

In a typical field research exercise, there are several key processes which occur in a reasonably sequential fashion.  An obvious observation is that each process has outputs or deliverables which feed into and impact on subsequent processes and thus the final outcome.

Some of the processes and activities which I will cover in separate posts include:

• Survey design
• Translation
• Deployment
• Conduction
• Collection
• Capture
• Cleaning and processing
• Analysis
• Archive
• Quality control
• Privacy and confidentiality
• Management of distributed resources

Each process can pose significant obstacles and expense when making use of paper-based techniques.  By replacing paper with a suitable technology alternative, we can go a long way to improving the efficiency and quality of field research and data collection.