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.
- Ask Margin: "respondents who scored low on Q4 — what did they say in Q5?"
- Per-respondent record with every answer type side by side, exportable as CSV or JSON 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, PII flags per project, and an append-only activity log. Retention and hosting arrangements for institutional buyers are agreed per engagement.
Consent in the instrument
Embed your consent statement as the first section of the form. Because instruments are versioned, every response stays tied to the exact wording it was collected under.
PII flagged at the project
Mark a project as capturing personally identifying data and the flag follows it across the workspace, so the whole team handles those responses with care.
Activity log
Every state change — instrument published, invitations sent, responses received, AI calls — recorded in an append-only log with actor and timestamp.
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 CSV exports 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: hosting, retention, and access arrangements agreed per engagement — your jurisdiction, your rules. Talk to us about what your mandate requires.
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.