Built around how researchers actually work — not how software companies wish they worked.
Mixed methods, ethical constraints, ethics-board paperwork, multi-site teams, three-cycle longitudinal designs. We've sat in those rooms. The product is shaped by them.
Quantitative and qualitative, in the same instrument, on the same respondent.
The hard part of mixed-methods research isn't collecting both — it's keeping them connected. Most teams collect numbers in one tool and stories in another, then spend weeks stitching them by respondent ID. We made the respondent the unit; method follows.
One respondent. Many evidence types.
The same enumerator can ask Likert items, open-ended follow-ups, and record an audio clarification — all within the same form, all stored against the same respondent record. Margin can read the numbers and the words to find patterns neither would surface alone.
- Likert + open-text + audio in the same form.
- Cross-filter: "respondents who scored ≤2 on Q4 — what did they say in Q5?"
- Per-respondent transcript bundle for analysis software (NVivo, MAXQDA) when you want to take it elsewhere.
"Food prices keep climbing — last year the same money fed us a week, now barely four days. The market women say it's the fuel."
Consent, retention, audit — by design, not bolted on.
Your IRB or institutional review board has expectations. Fieldnote anticipates them: consent capture inside the instrument, retention policies per project, an immutable audit log, and (on the Sovereign plan) data residency in your own database.
Consent in the instrument
Embed your consent statement as the first block. Track who consented, when, and under which version of the statement. Withdraw consent retroactively if a respondent asks.
Retention policies
Per-project rules — e.g., delete audio 30 days after transcription, anonymise free-text PII flagged at design time, archive after study close-out.
Full audit log
Every read, write, export, AI call — logged with user, timestamp, IP. Defensible for IRB or audit reviews. Exportable as a project archive.
The data is sacred. Every response is append-only, every state change audit-logged, no silent overwrites.
What Fieldnote looks like in your hands.
A few representative shapes of work the product is sized for.
PhD fieldwork & faculty studies
Multi-cycle longitudinal designs, mixed methods, hundreds of respondents. A single workspace per study, multiple instruments per workspace, version-locked exports for SPSS/Stata when you write up.
Baseline → midline → endline cycles
Roster of 40 enumerators, three regions, weekly sync, supervisor dashboards. GPS-tagged household visits. Programme officer drafts the report from Margin's themed extracts.
Stakeholder interviews & rapid assessments
Public response links emailed to expert participants. Each one opens a tokenised, branded instrument — no app install, no account required. Sender tracks who opened, who submitted.
Sovereign data, sovereign decisions.
Sovereign plan: responses land in your Postgres + PostGIS — your jurisdiction, your retention rules, your access controls. We host the app; you host the data. SSO available.
Research is hard enough. The tool shouldn't make it harder.
Sign up, build your first instrument, send it to your enumerators or expert participants by tomorrow.