Digital Ethnographic Research

Maybe you can elaborate a little more on what you are trying to do? Ethnography is long term, in-person (or at least, "in Digital-world"), participant-observation. Qualtircs is a survey platform; this is a research methodology that is wholly different from ethnography. While you can certainly use surveys (and therefore Qualtrics) to _supplement_ ethnography, this question is confusing to me.

Thanks for taking the time to respond. We appreciate the methodology is very different, but want to see if anyone has leveraged the platform to run online ethnographic testing (simple for of tracking online blogs, diaries etc.) - I suspect it's not something the platform can handle as it is built differently form other vendors who offer both quant and qual capabilities. Just interested to see if there was a hack?!

Overall- the sort of qualitative aspect of remote user studies you've mentioned feel like they would too much of a hassle in Qualtrics. And I'm an anthropologist who loves Qualtrics. I bet you could utilize it for some diary entries for sure. But I think it'd be more hassle than it's worth; sending diary reminders would be a process that was very manual- it would not be possible to automate in-platform. Furthermore the analysis is going to be tricky; all diaries will be exported individually and you'll need to join them up in your preferred reading format after the fact. The qual functionality is going to be lacking. Qualtrics doesn't have a video option, and photo upload options are limited. They do have a TextIQ product that claims to analyze for themes that may be worth exploring. That being said, the data I receive exports really well to your CAQDAS; I've used NiVivo with survey responses frequently. Their Auto-code seems to do a decent job at finding themes, but a human will always need to review. Anything collect here is still going to have to be joined with fieldwork notes and such in a CAQDAS anyway. IMO: it's just not great for this use. I'd be interested to see if anyone disagrees, though.

I agree with your assessment @Kate. My background is in social science/social work research (quant/qual/and mixed methods). As you design your surveys in Qualtrics or other tools, it is good to think about your data collection and analysis plan. I often tell students that just because your Qualtrics or REDCap survey/instrument includes some open text fields it does not make it a good mixed methods project. It is important to think about your methodology in including qualitative and quantitative data into your survey/instrument before you finalize your survey/instrument.