MM Field Studio

MM Field Studio is a free iPad application developed by ReliCheck for mixed methods field data collection. It exists because of a moment every field researcher knows: you ask the scale question, a teacher answers 2, and then, almost as an afterthought, she tells you why, and the why is the whole finding. In most fieldwork the number goes into one place and the sentence goes into a notebook, a memory, or nowhere, and by the time analysis starts, the integration promised in the proposal is already gone. MM Field Studio keeps the number and the reason attached from the first second they exist.

Every quantitative item pairs with an optional explanation follow-up, and the app asks the researcher to name how the two relate: does the explanation explain the number, expand on it, complicate it, or is there a telling silence, a participant who gave a rating but would not say more. Explains, Expands, Complicates, or Silence: that relationship is the heart of mixed methods work, and here it is recorded in the moment rather than reconstructed weeks later from two separate files. The researcher is not collecting a quantitative dataset and a qualitative dataset to reconcile at a desk. They are capturing the join as it happens.

Consent comes first by structure. A session cannot begin until consent is captured, so the ethical step happens by design rather than by memory, which removes one of the easiest and most consequential things to forget in IRB-covered fieldwork.

Rich responses are first-class. Spoken answers are recorded and become searchable text on the iPad itself, using on-device transcription, with no cloud account, no per-minute cost, and no signal required, so it works in the school basement and the rural clinic alike. When words are not enough, Apple Pencil sketches attach directly to the case, along with photos, scanned documents, PDFs, and files, so the full texture of a session stays with the case it belongs to instead of scattering across a bag and a phone.

Fieldwork's worst surprises usually appear after the researcher has packed up and driven home. MM Field Studio runs readiness checks on each case and validates the export before handoff, surfacing the incomplete case on site, while the participant is still in the room and the gap can still be fixed.

Privacy comes from architecture. Everything runs on the iPad: transcription, sketching, scanning, and storage, with study data encrypted at rest behind the device passcode. Participant data never leaves the device unless the researcher decides to send it, and there are two ways out: Send to Desktop moves the case to MM Studio, the native macOS mixed methods application by ReliCheck, through iCloud Drive, so nothing leaves the Apple ecosystem at all; Send to Web uploads only after an explicit consent step.