Leveraging voice memos recorded via smartphones for qualitative data collection

The purpose of this paper is to discuss voice memos - where participants privately record their spoken responses to qualitative prompts on their smartphones - as a low-burden strategy for qualitative data collection. Collecting primary data has become increasingly challenging for social and behavioral scientists, both in recruiting research participants and securing quality and complete data. Qualitative data collection can pose even greater challenges due to it being time-consuming, cognitively taxing, and potentially socially undesirable for participants. We contend voice memos may be an opportune way of overcoming some of these challenges and describe our experience successfully collecting voice memo data as part of a community-based research study. We share insights on our procedures to collect voice memo data, including the survey tool and logic that could be repurposed for future studies, feasibility of collecting these data, quality of data collected via voice memos, and lessons learned from the process.