Going Deeper: In Person Digital Inclusion Research, With a Pack of Cards

A blog by Kat Dixon, Jangala’s Advocacy, Insights, and Strategy Lead

In this blog I explore how using interview tools can help us go deeper during in-person research. We made a set of bespoke cards focused on digital inclusion, and here I explore the benefits and limitations of working this way.

At the charity I work for - Jangala - we’re exploring the impact of internet on people’s lives while they’re living in temporary accommodation.

I’ve been leading on evaluating a) the experience of Jangala's box of internet for participants (we call it 'Get Box'), b) the impact of having / not having internet and c) how data limits can change the experience of being online.

Lots of people who are digitally excluded are over-surveyed, asked to give away a lot of data and for various reasons may not enjoy being interviewed. In an ideal world, we’d do careful, thorough participatory research. But Jangala is a small charity without lots of resources.

So, how do you engage people ethically on limited resources?

First, we worked really closely with our partners - Coventry Council, charities, housing associations, NHS services - to recruit people. They were brilliant, and we couldn't have done it without their help. We incentivised everyone, because we recognise people should not have to give up their time for free.

We made the interviews fun. Well, fun, might be a stretch. But we did think hard about how to make qualitative interviews less like interviews, and more like ways to explore together.

We came up with a variation on an existing methodology, called card sorting. We’re not sure, but we think we might be the first to use this method in a digital inclusion setting in this way (please comment if you know someone else who has done this!).

What are these cards and why do this?

We put together a home-made deck of cards. We mocked them up, our in-house Communications Manager designed them, and then we printed and laminated in our office-workshop. We made 25 cards in total, all representing something people do on the internet.

Hala Kabalan, our Communications Manager making the deck of cards

Consequently, larger problems have surfaced in areas with limited access to quality education, such as teenage pregnancy, with 23% of teenage girls in rural Peru becoming mothers.

Many teenage mothers are forced to leave school, a situation that affects eight out of ten pregnant teenage girls in Peru, according to the Ministry of Education*. This forced interruption harms their mental health and development, and puts an abrupt end to opportunities of academic and personal growth.

How did you choose the categories for the cards?

We used a mix of existing research, including ideas from the Periodic Table of Internet Elements (disclosure, I led the research that produced this in 2022 with the Data Poverty Lab) as well as initial survey findings from this project.

We knew this would be partly ‘wrong’ and that we’d learn from using them. We planned to bring post it notes (can't go wrong with post it notes) to help us learn from our gaps. We tested them internally and some colleagues added a few more.

Was it easy to choose the first set of cards?

No. We were really torn about using the words that end users use, eg. ‘YouTube’, ‘Netflix’ or broader categories ‘streaming video’. We also struggled with how big or small to go with our categories - do we say ‘books’ and ‘music’? Or just ‘entertainment?’

Overall, we tried to choose words our participants would recognise and use themselves, over being consistent with our categories, things like ‘Doctors appointments and prescriptions’ instead of ‘Health’ and ‘Universal Credit’ instead of ‘Government services’.

Because we weren't using them for quantitative analysis, we realised we could be more flexible with category choices.

Emily Kay, our freelance researcher working with the cards

What happened when using the cards?

The cards seemed to help people relax. We gave each participant half the deck to start with, often laying them out or passing them a set. Then after discussion, we'd introduce the rest.

Some people treated it like a game. Many participants seemed to like something to hold. It definitely helped relax the conversation, to diffuse the focus on the cards in front of us, that we could look at together.

People used them in their own ways. Some people asked us what to do, some took them and sorted through them. Some people immediately started laying out things in priority and creating an order. Sometimes that order was framed by our suggestion (ie most important); some of it was self directed.

People offered quite personal reflections, given a card. One card said ‘music’. When we asked people about this card, some participated talked about the kind of music they like, artists they listen to. Then they would share more - about how they use music to sleep, to calm down, to remind them of someone they loved who had died (this last one turned out to be quite common).

It’s possible we could have had this conversation without the card prompts, but I think it’s unlikely we would have got there if we’d simply asked, ‘what do you use the internet for?’ The cards helped us go deeper, to understand what these activities mean to the participants.

An example exercise, based around 'importance'

Did the cards help us learn anything new?

We had some post its and sharpies to create new cards. We often wrote these using the words of the participants, or summarised afterwards, and laid them out amongst the other cards. Some ones we missed in the first round were ‘AI’, ‘taxis/ubers’, ‘weather’, ‘parenting apps’, ‘selling’.

We guided participants to order them by importance, but we also created hierarchies using their words. For example, with one participant, we made a post it which said ‘gets me through the day’. For another participant, we wrote ‘would like to do’ on a post it, and made a group of cards around what they aspired to, but lacked digital confidence.

The cards offered a form of reflection. More than one participant looked at the table at all the different things they used it for, and seemed surprised. I’ve noticed this before in previous digital inclusion research; we rarely think in depth about the sheer variety of things we use the internet for.

One participant noticed that they’d been using it mainly for leisure activities, as a coping mechanism after a difficult time. Seeing it all laid out, they commented that maybe it was time to do more of the ‘life admin’ things.

What did we learn from using these cards?

Unexpected uses. During one home visit with a particularly spirited toddler present, I played with unused cards with the toddler while my colleague interviewed Mum. This proved helpful!

The cards seemed to take the sting out of exclusion. I think if we’d sat with a clipboard and a checklist and asked 25 questions; do you use the internet for banking; do you use the internet for universal credit; do you use the internet for music, we’d have created a very unpleasant experience for our participants. Especially the participants who mainly used YouTube, because that was all they knew how to do.

Exclusion is hard, especially when you feel cut off from society. Although we really want to gather this information, we don’t want to make our participants feel bad unnecessarily about things they’ve not been able to do. Doing this work in a more gentle exploratory way feels important. We need to make the case for more people getting support to be online, but that shouldn't be at the cost of people who are struggling.

Having a deck of cards made it seem more like a game. We often created a 'discard pile' of cards that weren't relevant. We would hand a participant a stack of cards and ask them to lay down the important ones and 'throw away' the ones that weren't. This meant participants could direct the focus, sort through cards and identify them. This put them in the driving seat of the important stuff they wanted to share.

The cards may have reduced the value hierarchy. In lots of digital inclusion work, utilitarian uses of internet are valued above ‘softer’ uses. Researchers ask more readily about work, education, health and government access, rather than family connection, entertainment and play. This has often driven a need to prove the value of internet in a way that can be used in government reports, funding applications and to cross a political spectrum of values.

By having unordered cards, we helped participants choose what was important to them, with cards of equal size and significance. It won't have taken away this bias, but it may have helped. Participants seemed to freely put cards side by side such as 'Universal Credit' and 'Music' on their most important list.

Accessibility. The cards had pictures on them. We don’t know how much this contributed to overcoming language barriers, but it seemed to help.

One participant ordered internet uses by what can 'Get me through the day'

Were there any downsides?

We missed things. We missed out some key ones, likely because of our bias. I’d love to go back to the earlier interviews and ask about the ones we missed. It may have been that people didn't tell us things because we didn't suggest them - which might happen less if we just ask open questions.

We probably reduced bias in some ways and increased it in others. Because we did it quickly and lightly, our review process was small and we missed ‘parenting apps’ for example. None of the small group who came up with the original concepts have kids, but if we'd given it slightly more thought, we'd have noticed this.

The categorisation is tough. It’s difficult to make a deck that has the same level of umbrella terminology. Video streaming covers so much - and is mixed in with learning and education. We had one card called ‘Searching for information’ which could also mean health information. We know that health is more than ‘GP appointments and prescriptions’. There’s no easy way to split the subjects. We tried to bring this out in conversation, but it might mean this deck might is less suitable for some groups.

On balance, would you use cards in digital inclusion research again?

Yes. Especially if a research group is exploring the human meaning behind the access.

The people we’re working with have a wide variety of complex backgrounds and experiences; refugees, asylum seekers and migrants, people who are neurodiverse, have mental illness, experiences of mental ill health, survivors of domestic abuse, very low income, experience of the criminal justice system, some with limited English, some with limited literacy.

We found the deck of cards helped open up conversation, look at the wide variety of online activities, and help us learn new things. They seemed to help our participants be at ease, in what could easily have been a difficult set of interviews.

What next?

We plan to iterate the cards based on what we’ve learned, and we’d like to release them as tools for the digital community. What do you think? Would you like to give it a go?

We haven’t come up with a name for the cards yet, any ideas?

This work is part of a partnership programme with VM02 and Coventry Council's digital inclusion project #CovConnects - read here for more info.