Articles de revues sur le sujet « Mobile Financial Service Provider (MFSP) »

In Malaysia, Islamic microfinance institutions (IMFIs) are part of Islamic financial institutions and have been established to provide Islamic microfinance products (interest free loans). Their aim is to promote trade activities among Islamic microfinance recipients in improving their standard of living. Information and data gathered can be used as evidence to prove that Islamic microfinance has traits that provide a support system for the poorest of the poor. This study hence intends to investigate the application of technology by Islamic microfinance institutions within a context of its accounting information system through the usage of mobile banking. This study is conducted using qualitative approaches via interviews to obtain in depth understanding of mobile banking usage at an Islamic microfinance institution. Financial data, as well as data on the total number of loan recipients (sahabats) is referred by the study in investigating another aspect of social performance in terms of vicegerency and accountability of the IMFI. Extensive application of vicegerency concept in explaining the findings is parallel to Shari'ah Foundation for Accountants in outlining characteristics of Muslim accountants in preventing them from doing prohibited actions.

There have been multiple studies detailing mobile payment and its market potential. There is a gap in the literature when it comes to the study of acceptance factors focusing on security and trust. The researchers asked which qualities of security have an influence on the acceptance of a mobile payment service provider. Therefore this study will focus on distinguishing security in two dimensions: objective and subjective security. Objective security represents the user's perception of existing technical safety mechanisms. Subjective security is intangible, based on the user's feelings and perception towards security (trust). The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) was the theoretical model used in the study. About three hundred responses were collected using an online questionnaire. The study showed that despite the financial crisis banks are still the preferred providers for mobile payment services, where over 80% of the respondents would like to receive the service from a bank. In contrast, only 20% would like to receive such a service from a mobile phone producer. Additionally objective security does not substantially increase subjective security; hence the user trusts the provider rather than the technology itself.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe and conceptualize customer relationships in the financial service sector, focussing on three aspects of customer-bank relationships: the financial service provider perspective, the customer-provider dyad, and the customer context. Design/methodology/approach – Through a short review of the eight papers included in this special issue, this paper illustrates different aspects of customer relationships. It explores customer value formation in the context of banking services, the dynamics and strength of customer relationships, and strategies for financial service provision and consumer trust. Findings – Customer relationships in the financial service sector are increasingly dynamic and unpredictable. This may be due to both activities within the control of financial service providers, such as strategies for service provision, but is more often attributable to factors beyond the control of providers. What empowered customers are doing in their own settings influences their attitudes toward and evaluations of financial services. Research limitations/implications – The paper is conceptual. It challenges the firm-centric approach to customer relationships and compares different perspectives of customer relationships. The significance of the customer-centric perspective is emphasized. Practical implications – Awareness of uncontrollable and idiosyncratic aspects of customer relationships will offer financial service providers new opportunities for being present in the customers’ lives and business. Originality/value – This paper illustrates the importance of extending the focus from what financial service providers are doing to what customers are doing within their own domains. Financial service providers need to understand more about their customers than their perceptions of service quality, satisfaction, and loyalty in different distribution channels, such as internet and mobile banking. The focus should be instead on how customers integrate their financial activities and experiences in their own life or business.

Intense competition in the mobile services market encourages these service providers to take measures to create, maintain and enhance consumer loyalty. In such a concentrated market, it becomes important for service providers to identify and enhance the factors determining customer loyalty and their expression, whereas maintaining existing users requires significantly less effort and financial, human and time resources than attracting new ones. This article deals with a case study of Lithuania’s mobile operators: UAB “Bitė Lietuva”, UAB “Tele2”, UAB “Telia” in the context of consumer loyalty. The paper raises the question of what factors influence mobile phone user loyalty and how these factors can be evaluated. The article presents theoretical analysis of factors determining consumer loyalty in the service sector. An expert evaluation and multi-criteria study reveals which loyalty factors have the strongest influence on customers of mobile operators when choosing a particular service provider in Lithuania. The relevance of this article has potential for a practical study of consumer loyalty factors in the future. In the future, the research may be continued on a larger scale, involving more companies in the telecommunications sector, choosing research methods that are suitable for a broader sample of research and formulating consumer loyalty enhancement solutions applicable exclusively to organizations in the industry.

Understanding marketing channel performance is a crucial and complex task for the mobile financial technology segment of the mobile industry in emerging markets. However, poor techniques and capabilities for channel optimization of the mobile money users across available channels by the service providers often undermine the performance of these channels. The research aims to develop a target selection and campaign optimization framework for mobile money customers along two channels of transactions. It is complemented by mapping the appropriate campaign techniques across digital and non-digital channels of mobile money transactions. The key analytical method is the combination of fuzzy c-means clustering and RFM algorithm for the target selection development through the usage logs of customers (n = 300) of a mobile service provider. The results indicated that fuzzy c-means clustering and RFM algorithm are efficient for target selection. Also, the mapping of clusters with the appropriate channel of transactions revealed that mobile money users’ transactions could be optimized along the digital channel. The analytic model’s output enables appropriate cross-selling and up-selling campaigns that optimize the service provider revenue from existing and new mobile money users within the customer base. The channel evaluation revealed mobile application channels to be a promising and future channel for mobile money transactions as smartphone penetration continues to grow in emerging mobile markets. That is a positive sign of the digital channel’s future potential for mobile money transactions in developing markets. Acknowledgment The authors wish to thank the University of Pecs under the Higher Education Institution Excellence Program of the Ministry of Innovation and Technology in Hungary within the framework of the 4th Thematic Program – “Enhancing the Role of Domestic Companies in the Re-industrialization of Hungary.”

We consider that around the Consumer gravitate all the problems concerning any provider (supplyer) or distributor. The actual economic and financial world crisis shown, once more, that the firms have to conceive and develop theirs products and services according to the needs, the preferences and the budgets of the potential consumers. The domain of mobile telephony is the the specific production and service aspect addressed in this paper. Despite the crisis effects, this domain continued its expansion in Romania and not only. The communication is a necessity and the facilities, the devices and the revolutionary new IT technologies are essential in these days for many people, among them the Romanian consumers. The study case is based on the experience of a Romanian company, Vegastel (partner of the corporate entity "O", which has realised remarkable economic and financial results, just by the special attention to the requirements, preferences and financial potential of the clients (individuals or firms). The importance of the domain and its continuing improvement and reshaping entail for the firms in the field, including Vegastel, to permanent adapt the offer and take into account the consumers’ feedback, such that to gain profits and to remain sustainable on the market.

<p>This study aimed<ins cite="mailto:Author" datetime="2020-10-25T10:56"> </ins>to examine the effect of customer perceived value on the loyalty of mobile wallet (m-wallet) users. Payment using mobile wallet offers several benefits for consumer in terms of functional, social, and economic value. Meanwhile, Service-Dominant Logic was<ins cite="mailto:Author" datetime="2020-10-25T10:56"> </ins>used to explain consumer’s experience in utilizing mobile wallet for payment. Furthermore, a quantitativeapproach with<ins cite="mailto:Author" datetime="2020-10-25T10:56"> </ins>questionnaire was used for data collection, and<ins cite="mailto:Author" datetime="2020-10-25T10:58"> </ins>a total of 325 users participated as the respondents. A purposivesampling technique was used to determine the sample criteria i.e. active m-wallet users with a minimum usage<ins cite="mailto:Author" datetime="2020-10-25T10:58"> </ins>of 1 year. The result showed that all the hypotheses are supported. This indicated that customer perceived value consist of functional, economic, and social value, which have positive and significant impact on satisfaction that leads to customer loyalty. Meanwhile, satisfactionis the most salient predictor of customer loyalty. Therefore, financial technology provider needs to pay more attention to customer perceived value, especially in terms of functional, economic and social aspect.</p>

Objective - Mobile banking is a growing activity to engage the non-banking people in the banking system in Bangladesh, so researchers of this paper try to find out how much it is affected by the Coronavirus (COVID-19). Basically, this study is developed to assess the performance of mobile banking during the COVID-19 pandemic period comparing with the pre-pandemic period. Methodology/Technique - Authors use descriptive statistics to evaluate the performance of mobile bank during the study period from 2014 to August 2020. Findings - This paper finds that during the COVID period the average change of monthly number of active accounts & registered clients have increased, on the other hand the average change of monthly number of agents have decreased at the same time. Except cash in & cash out, all other types of transactions proportion of mobile banking have increased during the COVID-19 period. Novelty - As the mobile banking is a key resource for banking people as well as non-banking people to transact financial things at setting at the house, so this paper will be beneficial for mobile banking service provider organization to assess the whole things of mobile banking at this ongoing period, and they can take necessary action. Type of Paper - Empirical. Keywords: Mobile Banking, COVID-19, Financial Performance, Bangladesh. JEL Classification: G21, G22. URI: http://gatrenterprise.com/GATRJournals/AFR/vol6.1_2.html DOI: https://doi.org/10.35609/afr.2021.6.1(2) Pages 54 – 68

E-banking means electronic banking which is popularly known as anywhere banking. Electronic banking also known as EFT (electronic Fund Transfer) means transfer amount online from one account to another account rather by using physical cheque. Information technology has taken important place in the future development of financial service, specially banking sector transaction are affected more than any other financial provider groups. Increased use of mobile services and use of internet as a new distribution channel for banking transactions and international trading requires more attention towards e-banking security against fraudulent activities. The development and the increasing progress that is being experienced in the Information and Communication Technology have brought about a lot of changes in almost all facets of life. In the Banking Industry, it has been in the form of online banking, which is now replacing the traditional banking practice. Although it is proving boon to all sectors especially to all types of customers and financial sector but its growing use without awareness has also attracted many crimes and frauds. Through this paper, it is tried tom discuss about growth of E-banking along with growing challenges of risk & Insecurity. Emphasis is given on awareness to be given to E-banking users and establishment of more security measures to avoid chances of misappropriation of funds and cybercrimes. Online banking has a lot of benefits which add value to customers’ satisfaction in terms of better quality of service offerings and at the same time enable the banks gain more competitive advantage over other competitors. This paper discusses some challenges in an emerging economy and benefits of E-banking.

<table width="593" border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tbody><tr><td valign="top" width="387"><p>There are few studies on factors influencing cloud computing adoption in higher education institutions. However, there are lacks of understanding of the cloud computing adoption issues in the university. The main objective of this study is to investigate factors influencing cloud computing adoption in a higher education institution. The research method involved using qualitative interviewing with relevant stakeholders and case study at one public university in Malaysia. The analysis was done by using Atlat.ti. There are eighteen factors that have been coded into three main categories of Technological, Organizational and Environmental. These are among factors to influence the decision of cloud computing adoption for a public university. The first category (Technological) consists of nine factors; (i) relative advantage, (ii) cost reduction, (iii) ease of use, (iv) compatibility, (v) operational requirement, (vi) security, (vii) sustainability, (viii) trialability and (ix) complexity, The second category (organizational) consists of four factors; (i) infrastructure readiness, (ii) top management, (iii) knowledge and IT skillset and (iv) financial. The third category (environmental) consists of five factors; (i) Cloud Service Provider, (ii) Geographical, (iii) Data Privacy, (iv) Guideline and Policy, (v) Service Level Agreement (SLA). The result may provide a reference for the adoption of cloud computing in the area of mobile learning or mobile computing. Future work involves conducting similar studies at other case studies including public and private universities in Malaysia.</p></td></tr></tbody></table>

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to assess the switching costs impact on the customer retention in the Lebanese telecommunication industry. Design/methodology/approach: Based on previous literature around customer retention and switching costs, a qualitative survey was conducted on one of the two operators managing the telecommunication market in Lebanon. Focus groups were organized to capture the point of view and perspective of top managers of the operator, results were then coded, and analyzed. Findings: Due to the current duopoly and status quo of the Lebanese telecommunication market, owned completely by the government and managed by two operators sharing the market equally and offering nearly the same portfolio, technologies and network coverage, the switching costs include only the time and effort needed to switch to the other operator, the financial fees to be paid upon buying a new subscription, the attachment to mobile number, and the relational loss from breaking bond with the current provider. Research limitations/implications: Focus group sessions were conducted with managers of one of the two telecom operators in Lebanon, and it might be relevant to interview the managers of the other operator as well. This topic was tackled from the provider’s point of view; it would be interesting to check the customers’ point of view. Practical implications: Managers in the Lebanese telecommunication industry can prepare marketing strategies including customer retention programs and well-designed switching costs to protect and increase their market share once this sector induces more competition either with the introduction of the number portability service or with the privatization of this sector in Lebanon. Originality/value: The customer retention and switching costs constructs are not yet studied in the Lebanese telecommunication market, and also due to the saturation in this industry, customer retention is becoming an imperative topic to all operators in this business.

Bharti Airtel Limited was a leading private sector provider of telecommunication services in India, with a customer base of 8.73 million as of July 2004. The company had two branch companies — Bharti Infotel (that dealt with fixed line, long distance, and enterprise services) and Bharti Cellular (that dealt with mobile telephone services). This case is about the six sigma implementation at Bharti Infotel. The case briefly discusses the business imperatives in the fast changing Indian telecommunications industry. The industry was a monopoly for over half a century after independence and had recently been deregulated with the private players competing with the state-owned BSNL. The industry had exploded in the recent years with increasing number of players, falling tariffs, and improving technology. Stiff competition in the industry meant that any competitive action by a company was immediately imitated by others. Therefore the only sources of competitive advantage in the industry were “quality of service” and “speed”. This case discusses the various steps in the implementation of six sigma quality management system in the company. The company had already implemented Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) and had begun monitoring their performance on the Non-Financial Parameters (NFPs). The six sigma initiative was expected to leverage on these initiatives. Following the six sigma initiative was the Knowledge Management (KM) initiative that was intended to help share the best practices and learning from the six sigma projects across the entire organization. This case highlights the contribution of the six sigma quality management initiative to the company's business strategy, and helps students analyze the process of implementing and institutionalizing the six sigma initiative. The case enables the readers to appreciate the business benefits of six sigma implementation and how it fosters innovation.

Abstract Background The South Florida Metropolitan Statistical Area has for several years recorded the highest HIV incidence in the nation, and prevalence in the top three of all counties. To address the alarming disparity in HIV impact, we developed a survey study to learn about the beliefs, attitudes, and perspectives of persons who accessed services at an HIV community-based organization in South Florida. Methods Surveys were administered in English and Spanish to 109 persons who visited a community-based HIV service provider (Latinos Salud) at any of its three South Florida sites in April 2019. The survey evaluated the participants’ perspectives on different avenues for HIV counseling, screening, and accessing HIV medications for prevention or treatment. Results The majority of survey participants were male (90%), homosexual/gay/queer (75%), and Hispanic/Latino (56%; Table 1). Participants’ self-reported their HIV status as negative (64%), positive (30%), or unknown (6%; Table 1). Of those not currently living with HIV, 77% reported having been tested within the past 6 months, and 81% reported recent engagement in high-risk activities (Table 1). Most participants considered using social media to promote awareness of HIV and related services a good idea (Table 2). Large proportions of participants endorsed receiving HIV counseling through in-person conversations with clinicians (91%), staff at community-based organizations (83%), friends (83%), telehealth visits (69%), conversations with teachers (63%), or church members (56%; Table 2). Most participants endorsed a range of both clinical (e.g. local health clinic) and non-clinical (e.g. mobile van) locations as acceptable settings for HIV testing (Table 2). Large proportions of participants endorsed receiving medications to prevent or treat HIV immediately after testing (82%), by home delivery (78%), or through telehealth (60%; Table 2). Meaningful associations were found between certain patient demographics (race/ethnicity, testing history, or insurance status) and the participants’ perspectives on specific strategies (Table 3). Table 1. Participant Characteristics Table 2. Participants’ Views on Strategies for HIV Counseling, Testing, and Access to Medications Table 3. Participants’ Views on Strategies for HIV Counseling, Testing, and Access to Medications Stratified by Patient Characteristics Conclusion These real-world findings can be used to inform clinic- and community-based interventions tailored to individual patient characteristics. Disclosures Tamar Sapir, PhD, Gilead Sciences, Inc. (Other Financial or Material Support, Independent medical education grant)

Background: Internet is a global network that can be accessed through computers, mobile phones, PDA, digital TVs etc. The number of Internet users is constantly growing, and internet communications have become routine. The use of internet by companies to provide their products and brand is commonplace and even inevitable. This paper is focused on marketing by high-speed and low-cost internet. Emarketing refers to all efforts in terms of adjusting and developing marketing strategies in virtual spaces including, web, social media etc. Big and powerful internet marketing websites do not make small internet websites disappear but enable them to gain competitive advantage by market segmentation strategy. When a customer visits a website (websites), he leaves a trace of data called digital footprint that can be used to know and understand the customer requirements, desires and requests as well as improve and enhance the web. The e-marketing real position can be seen by an online survey on Iran retailers and two deep and accurate interviews. Objective: This paper is focused on marketing by high-speed and low-cost internet. Method: When a customer visits a website (websites), he leaves a trace of data called digital footprint that can be used to know and understand the customer requirements, desires and requests as well as improve and enhance the web. The e-marketing real position can be seen by an online survey on Iran retailers and two deep and accurate interviews. Results: E-markets and online orders are amongst common ways of customer affairs management in many commercial organizations and institutions. : E-marketing is not only a specific performance related to selling products and services but also a managerial process to manage the relationship between the organization and customer. Conclusion: E-marketing performance can be introduced and categorized in three parts: 1. Integration: e-marketing involves all selling stages by the company as well as the company agents, as an integrated process. 2. Mediation: e-marketing controls the amount of customers’ demands and requirement by the amount of production and the service provider capacity of the company. 3. Brokerage: e-marketing plays a broker role among different parts of the company including financial sectors and foreign investors. Smart marketing processes should always focus on the necessary relationships between e-marketing processes and data-mining techniques to develop specific marketing strategies on the internet. Today, the access to the information is no longer a major benefit of the organizations, but the optimal use of the information is the senior managers’ main concern. It cannot be possible unless it is based upon the integrated and efficient systems in a way that it can cover all the organization’s activities and provide customers with the information in due time. With the high-speed internet and people turning to easier and more comfortable life, they can shop online. We found that market segmentation provided unexpected strategies to win the competition with small websites and our analyses showed that small websites could increase their share in the market, stay in the competition or win by market segmentation.

PurposeWhile the usage of mobile financial services (MFSs) is increasing rapidly in developing countries, research on users' attitudes and behavioral intention to adopt MFS is limited. Thus, this study aims to investigate customers' attitudes and intentions to adopt MFS from a Bangladeshi perspective.Design/methodology/approachA mixed research design was employed to conduct this study. Data of 196 respondents were analyzed using partial least squares (PLS) path modeling. For the quantitative part, data collection was conducted using non-probability sampling through a structured survey questionnaire. A focus group discussion with ten MFS users from divergent backgrounds was conducted to validate the quantitative findings.FindingsThis paper integrated both the technology acceptance model (TAM) and innovation resistance theory (IRT) to validate the results. The authors found that perceived usefulness (PU), perceived ease of use (PEOU) and perceived trust (PT) positively contribute to customers' attitudes toward MFS adoption. Besides, barriers to acceptance had unfavorable effects on users' attitudes and usage intentions. Furthermore, a focus group discussion revealed valuable insights on the constructs used in this study.Practical implicationsThe study results have implications for both MFS providers and researchers. The outputs and recommendations presented in this paper will encourage the MFS practitioners to stimulate users' attitudes and behavioral intentions by ensuring useful, easy to use, credible and risk-free mobile payment platforms.Originality/valueThis is one of the very few studies in Bangladesh that have taken a contemporary and emerging research topic, providing theoretical, methodological and practical contributions regarding the determinants and consequences of attitude toward using MFSs.

Purpose To understand the financial services experience and consumption in Nigeria from the perspectives of both the customers and managers. This study aims to explore this under-researched area and contribute towards a transformative financial service in the country. Design/methodology/approach Semi-structured interviews with 26 bank customers and seven top bank executives. Findings A conceptual framework, which has emerged from the analysis of the results, revealed three overarching factors that shape these experiences from the perspective of both consumers and managers – service maintenance, service technology and service dynamics. Practical implications For sustainable service maintenance, bank executives need to increase the overall level of transparency in their operations, particularly regarding bank charges, to ensure that customers are not subjected to hidden and unnecessary charges. The use of technology in service provision and delivery should play a prominent role. Managers should also provide innovative and user-friendly technology, communicating with customers and raising awareness of the benefits. Customers who are reluctant to adopt the technology should be educated and reassured. Recognising the service dynamics, managers should improve customer services and relationships, effectively manage the mobile money agent relationship and market new and relevant products to their target audience. Social implications The understanding of the financial services experience and consumption of citizens and residents in the demonstrate how the appropriate programmes and policies that enhance financial inclusion could be introduced and implemented in the country. It enables financial service managers to improve their services to their customers and policymakers to develop timely, relevant and appropriate policies to address and/or bridge the identified gaps in financial inclusion. The understanding of the financial services experience and consumption of citizens and residents in the demonstrate how the appropriate programmes and policies that enhance financial inclusion could be introduced and implemented in the country. Originality/value Through the sampling, this paper reiterates the need for consumer engagement and collaborative customer-provider relationships in redesigning financial services. This aligns with the transformative research agenda, which aims to increase access to financial services, decrease disparity and ensure consumers’ financial well-being.

Objective: Smallholder farmers’ access to Mobile Phone Based Money Transfer Services in Akatsi North District of Volta Region of Ghana under the Planting for Food and Jobs Programme. Methods: Primary data were collected from 300 farmers in beneficiary districts while secondary data were gathered from literatures and various actors. A multi-stage sampling technique was used in selecting respondents for the study. The first stage involved selecting ten communities that benefited from the planting for food and jobs program in the Akatsi North district, while the second stage considered randomly selecting 30 beneficiary farmers in each community. Obtained data were analyzed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences and STATA-11 software. Results were presented in the form of descriptive statistics, cross tabulation, and Logit regression model. Results: Majority of respondents (74%) do not use Mobile Phone Based Money Transfer platform for any agricultural transaction. Is only 26% of the respondents that use the mobile money platform for their agribusiness activities. Out of the nine explanatory variables included in the Logit regression model, six of them were significant at p<0.01, p<0.05, and p<0.1. Significant factors include: Educational level of households, age, major occupation, accessibility of mobile money service provider, convenience to respondent, trust of the system, and availability of mobile money service. Conclusions: The availability and accessibility of Mobile Phone Based Money financial services among smallholder farmers is key to achieving competitive global business.

Mobile In many countries, more people have mobile phones than they do fixed-line phones. Mobile phones are one of the fastest growing technologies ever, outstripping even the internet in many respects. With the advent and widespread deployment of digital systems, mobile phones were used by an estimated 1, 158, 254, 300 people worldwide in 2002 (up from approximately 91 million in 1995), 51. 4% of total telephone subscribers (ITU). One of the reasons for this is mobility itself: the ability for people to talk on the phone wherever they are. The communicative possibilities opened up by mobile phones have produced new uses and new discourses (see Katz and Aakhus; Brown, Green, and Harper; and Plant). Contemporary soundscapes now feature not only voice calls in previously quiet public spaces such as buses or restaurants but also the aural irruptions of customised polyphonic ringtones identifying whose phone is ringing by the tune downloaded. The mobile phone plays an important role in contemporary visual and material culture as fashion item and status symbol. Most tragically one might point to the tableau of people in the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, or aboard a plane about to crash, calling their loved ones to say good-bye (Galvin). By contrast, one can look on at the bathos of Australian cricketer Shane Warne’s predilection for pressing his mobile phone into service to arrange wanted and unwanted assignations while on tour. In this article, I wish to consider another important and so far also under-theorised aspect of mobile phones: text. Of contemporary textual and semiotic systems, mobile text is only a recent addition. Yet it is already produces millions of inscriptions each day, and promises to be of far-reaching significance. Txt Txt msg ws an acidnt. no 1 expcted it. Whn the 1st txt msg ws sent, in 1993 by Nokia eng stdnt Riku Pihkonen, the telcom cpnies thought it ws nt important. SMS – Short Message Service – ws nt considrd a majr pt of GSM. Like mny teks, the *pwr* of txt — indeed, the *pwr* of the fon — wz discvrd by users. In the case of txt mssng, the usrs were the yng or poor in the W and E. (Agar 105) As Jon Agar suggests in Constant Touch, textual communication through mobile phone was an after-thought. Mobile phones use radio waves, operating on a cellular system. The first such mobile service went live in Chicago in December 1978, in Sweden in 1981, in January 1985 in the United Kingdom (Agar), and in the mid-1980s in Australia. Mobile cellular systems allowed efficient sharing of scarce spectrum, improvements in handsets and quality, drawing on advances in science and engineering. In the first instance, technology designers, manufacturers, and mobile phone companies had been preoccupied with transferring telephone capabilities and culture to the mobile phone platform. With the growth in data communications from the 1960s onwards, consideration had been given to data capabilities of mobile phone. One difficulty, however, had been the poor quality and slow transfer rates of data communications over mobile networks, especially with first-generation analogue and early second-generation digital mobile phones. As the internet was widely and wildly adopted in the early to mid-1990s, mobile phone proponents looked at mimicking internet and online data services possibilities on their hand-held devices. What could work on a computer screen, it was thought, could be reinvented in miniature for the mobile phone — and hence much money was invested into the wireless access protocol (or WAP), which spectacularly flopped. The future of mobiles as a material support for text culture was not to lie, at first at least, in aping the world-wide web for the phone. It came from an unexpected direction: cheap, simple letters, spelling out short messages with strange new ellipses. SMS was built into the European Global System for Mobile (GSM) standard as an insignificant, additional capability. A number of telecommunications manufacturers thought so little of the SMS as not to not design or even offer the equipment needed (the servers, for instance) for the distribution of the messages. The character sets were limited, the keyboards small, the typeface displays rudimentary, and there was no acknowledgement that messages were actually received by the recipient. Yet SMS was cheap, and it offered one-to-one, or one-to-many, text communications that could be read at leisure, or more often, immediately. SMS was avidly taken up by young people, forming a new culture of media use. Sending a text message offered a relatively cheap and affordable alternative to the still expensive timed calls of voice mobile. In its early beginnings, mobile text can be seen as a subcultural activity. The text culture featured compressed, cryptic messages, with users devising their own abbreviations and grammar. One of the reasons young people took to texting was a tactic of consolidating and shaping their own shared culture, in distinction from the general culture dominated by their parents and other adults. Mobile texting become involved in a wider reworking of youth culture, involving other new media forms and technologies, and cultural developments (Butcher and Thomas). Another subculture that also was in the vanguard of SMS was the Deaf ‘community’. Though the Alexander Graham Bell, celebrated as the inventor of the telephone, very much had his hearing-impaired wife in mind in devising a new form of communication, Deaf people have been systematically left off the telecommunications network since this time. Deaf people pioneered an earlier form of text communications based on the Baudot standard, used for telex communications. Known as teletypewriter (TTY), or telecommunications device for the Deaf (TDD) in the US, this technology allowed Deaf people to communicate with each other by connecting such devices to the phone network. The addition of a relay service (established in Australia in the mid-1990s after much government resistance) allows Deaf people to communicate with hearing people without TTYs (Goggin & Newell). Connecting TTYs to mobile phones have been a vexed issue, however, because the digital phone network in Australia does not allow compatibility. For this reason, and because of other features, Deaf people have become avid users of SMS (Harper). An especially favoured device in Europe has been the Nokia Communicator, with its hinged keyboard. The move from a ‘restricted’, ‘subcultural’ economy to a ‘general’ economy sees mobile texting become incorporated in the semiotic texture and prosaic practices of everyday life. Many users were already familiar with the new conventions already developed around electronic mail, with shorter, crisper messages sent and received — more conversation-like than other correspondence. Unlike phone calls, email is asynchronous. The sender can respond immediately, and the reply will be received with seconds. However, they can also choose to reply at their leisure. Similarly, for the adept user, SMS offers considerable advantages over voice communications, because it makes textual production mobile. Writing and reading can take place wherever a mobile phone can be turned on: in the street, on the train, in the club, in the lecture theatre, in bed. The body writes differently too. Writing with a pen takes a finger and thumb. Typing on a keyboard requires between two and ten fingers. The mobile phone uses the ‘fifth finger’ — the thumb. Always too early, and too late, to speculate on contemporary culture (Morris), it is worth analyzing the textuality of mobile text. Theorists of media, especially television, have insisted on understanding the specific textual modes of different cultural forms. We are familiar with this imperative, and other methods of making visible and decentring structures of text, and the institutions which animate and frame them (whether author or producer; reader or audience; the cultural expectations encoded in genre; the inscriptions in technology). In formal terms, mobile text can be described as involving elision, great compression, and open-endedness. Its channels of communication physically constrain the composition of a very long single text message. Imagine sending James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake in one text message. How long would it take to key in this exemplar of the disintegration of the cultural form of the novel? How long would it take to read? How would one navigate the text? Imagine sending the Courier-Mail or Financial Review newspaper over a series of text messages? The concept of the ‘news’, with all its cultural baggage, is being reconfigured by mobile text — more along the lines of the older technology of the telegraph, perhaps: a few words suffices to signify what is important. Mobile textuality, then, involves a radical fragmentation and unpredictable seriality of text lexia (Barthes). Sometimes a mobile text looks singular: saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or sending your name and ID number to obtain your high school or university results. Yet, like a telephone conversation, or any text perhaps, its structure is always predicated upon, and haunted by, the other. Its imagined reader always has a mobile phone too, little time, no fixed address (except that hailed by the network’s radio transmitter), and a finger poised to respond. Mobile text has structure and channels. Yet, like all text, our reading and writing of it reworks those fixities and makes destabilizes our ‘clear’ communication. After all, mobile textuality has a set of new pre-conditions and fragilities. It introduces new sorts of ‘noise’ to signal problems to annoy those theorists cleaving to the Shannon and Weaver linear model of communication; signals often drop out; there is a network confirmation (and message displayed) that text messages have been sent, but no system guarantee that they have been received. Our friend or service provider might text us back, but how do we know that they got our text message? Commodity We are familiar now with the pleasures of mobile text, the smile of alerting a friend to our arrival, celebrating good news, jilting a lover, making a threat, firing a worker, flirting and picking-up. Text culture has a new vector of mobility, invented by its users, but now coveted and commodified by businesses who did not see it coming in the first place. Nimble in its keystrokes, rich in expressivity and cultural invention, but relatively rudimentary in its technical characteristics, mobile text culture has finally registered in the boardrooms of communications companies. Not only is SMS the preferred medium of mobile phone users to keep in touch with each other, SMS has insinuated itself into previously separate communication industries arenas. In 2002-2003 SMS became firmly established in television broadcasting. Finally, interactive television had arrived after many years of prototyping and being heralded. The keenly awaited back-channel for television arrives courtesy not of cable or satellite television, nor an extra fixed-phone line. It’s the mobile phone, stupid! Big Brother was not only a watershed in reality television, but also in convergent media. Less obvious perhaps than supplementary viewing, or biographies, or chat on Big Brother websites around the world was the use of SMS for voting. SMS is now routinely used by mainstream television channels for viewer feedback, contest entry, and program information. As well as its widespread deployment in broadcasting, mobile text culture has been the language of prosaic, everyday transactions. Slipping into a café at Bronte Beach in Sydney, why not pay your parking meter via SMS? You’ll even receive a warning when your time is up. The mobile is becoming the ‘electronic purse’, with SMS providing its syntax and sentences. The belated ingenuity of those fascinated by the economics of mobile text has also coincided with a technological reworking of its possibilities, with new implications for its semiotic possibilities. Multimedia messaging (MMS) has now been deployed, on capable digital phones (an instance of what has been called 2.5 generation [G] digital phones) and third-generation networks. MMS allows images, video, and audio to be communicated. At one level, this sort of capability can be user-generated, as in the popularity of mobiles that take pictures and send these to other users. Television broadcasters are also interested in the capability to send video clips of favourite programs to viewers. Not content with the revenues raised from millions of standard-priced SMS, and now MMS transactions, commercial participants along the value chain are keenly awaiting the deployment of what is called ‘premium rate’ SMS and MMS services. These services will involve the delivery of desirable content via SMS and MMS, and be priced at a premium. Products and services are likely to include: one-to-one textchat; subscription services (content delivered on handset); multi-party text chat (such as chat rooms); adult entertainment services; multi-part messages (such as text communications plus downloads); download of video or ringtones. In August 2003, one text-chat service charged $4.40 for a pair of SMS. Pwr At the end of 2003, we have scarcely registered the textual practices and systems in mobile text, a culture that sprang up in the interstices of telecommunications. It may be urgent that we do think about the stakes here, as SMS is being extended and commodified. There are obvious and serious policy issues in premium rate SMS and MMS services, and questions concerning the political economy in which these are embedded. Yet there are cultural questions too, with intricate ramifications. How do we understand the effects of mobile textuality, rewriting the telephone book for this new cultural form (Ronell). What are the new genres emerging? And what are the implications for cultural practice and policy? Does it matter, for instance, that new MMS and 3rd generation mobile platforms are not being designed or offered with any-to-any capabilities in mind: allowing any user to upload and send multimedia communications to other any. True, as the example of SMS shows, the inventiveness of users is difficult to foresee and predict, and so new forms of mobile text may have all sorts of relationships with content and communication. However, there are worrying signs of these developing mobile circuits being programmed for narrow channels of retail purchase of cultural products rather than open-source, open-architecture, publicly usable nodes of connection. Works Cited Agar, Jon. Constant Touch: A Global History of the Mobile Phone. Cambridge: Icon, 2003. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill & Wang, 1974. Brown, Barry, Green, Nicola, and Harper, Richard, eds. Wireless World: Social, Cultural, and Interactional Aspects of the Mobile Age. London: Springer Verlag, 2001. Butcher, Melissa, and Thomas, Mandy, eds. Ingenious: Emerging youth cultures in urban Australia. Melbourne: Pluto, 2003. Galvin, Michael. ‘September 11 and the Logistics of Communication.’ Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 17.3 (2003): 303-13. Goggin, Gerard, and Newell, Christopher. Digital Disability: The Social Construction of Digital in New Media. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Harper, Phil. ‘Networking the Deaf Nation.’ Australian Journal of Communication 30. 3 (2003), in press. International Telecommunications Union (ITU). ‘Mobile Cellular, subscribers per 100 people.’ World Telecommunication Indicators <http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/> accessed 13 October 2003. Katz, James E., and Aakhus, Mark, eds. Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2002. Morris, Meaghan. Too Soon, Too Late: History in Popular Culture. Bloomington and Indianapolis: U of Indiana P, 1998. Plant, Sadie. On the Mobile: The Effects of Mobile Telephones on Social and Individual Life. < http://www.motorola.com/mot/documents/0,1028,296,00.pdf> accessed 5 October 2003. Ronell, Avital. The Telephone Book: Technology—schizophrenia—electric speech. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Goggin, Gerard. "‘mobile text’" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/03-goggin.php>. APA Style Goggin, G. (2004, Jan 12). ‘mobile text’. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/03-goggin.php>

Introduction As social-distancing mandates in response to COVID-19 restricted in-person data collection methods such as participant observation and interviews, researchers turned to socially distant methods such as interviewing via video-conferencing technology (Lobe et al.). These were not new tools nor methods, but the pandemic muted any bias towards face-to-face data collection methods. Exemplified in crowd-sourced documents such as Doing Fieldwork in a Pandemic, researchers were encouraged to pivot to digital methods as a means of fulfilling research objectives, “specifically, ideas for avoiding in-person interactions by using mediated forms that will achieve similar ends” (Lupton). The benefits of digital methods for expanding participant cohorts and scope of research have been touted long before 2020 and COVID-19, and, as noted by Murthy, are “compelling” (“Emergent” 172). Research conducted by digital methods can expect to reap benefits such as “global datasets/respondents” and “new modalities for involving respondents” (Murthy, “Emergent” 172). The pivot to digital methods is not in and of itself an issue. What concerns us is that in the dialogues about shifting to digital methods during COVID-19, there does not yet appear to have been a critical consideration of how participant samples and collected data will be impacted upon or skewed towards recording the experiences of advantaged cohorts. Existing literature focusses on the time-saving benefits for the researcher, reduction of travel costs (Fujii), the minimal costs for users of specific platforms – e.g. Skype –, and presumes ubiquity of device access for participants (Cater). We found no discussion on data costs of accessing such services being potential barriers to participation in research, although Deakin and Wakefield did share our concern that: Online interviews may ... mean that some participants are excluded due to the need to have technological competence required to participate, obtain software and to maintain Internet connection for the duration of the discussion. In this sense, access to certain groups may be a problem and may lead to issues of representativeness. (605) We write this as a provocation to our colleagues conducting research at this time to consider the cultural and material capital of their participants and how that capital enables them to participate in digitally-mediated data gathering practices, or not, and to what extent. Despite highlighting the potential benefits of digital methods within a methodological tool kit, Murthy previously cautioned against the implications posed by digital exclusion, noting that “the drawback of these research options is that membership of these communities is inherently restricted to the digital ‘haves’ ... rather than the ‘have nots’” (“Digital” 845). In this article, we argue that while tools such as Zoom have indeed enabled fieldwork to continue despite COVID disruptions, this shift to online platforms has important and under-acknowledged implications for who is and is not able to participate in research. In making this argument, we draw on examples from the Connected Students project, a study of digital inclusion that commenced just as COVID-19 restrictions came into effect in the Australian state of Victoria at the start of 2020. We draw on the experiences of these households to illustrate the barriers that such cohorts face when participating in online research. We begin by providing details about the Connected Students project and then contextualising it through a discussion of research on digital inclusion. We then outline three areas in which households would have experienced (or still do experience) difficulties participating in online research: data, devices, and skills. We use these findings to highlight the barriers that disadvantaged groups may face when engaging in data collection activities over Zoom and question how this is impacting on who is and is not being included in research during COVID-19. The Connected Students Program The Connected Students program was conducted in Shepparton, a regional city located 180km north of Melbourne. The town itself has a population of around 30,000, while the Greater Shepparton region comprises around 64,000 residents. Shepparton was chosen as the program’s site because it is characterised by a unique combination of low-income and low levels of digital inclusion. First, Shepparton ranks in the lowest interval for the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA) and the Index of Relative Socioeconomic Advantage and Disadvantage (IRSAD), as reported in 2016 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, “Census”; Australian Bureau of Statistics, “Index”). Although Shepparton has a strong agricultural and horticultural industry with a number of food-based manufacturing companies in the area, including fruit canneries, dairies, and food processing plants, the town has high levels of long-term and intergenerational unemployment and jobless families. Second, Shepparton is in a regional area that ranks in the lowest interval for the Australian Digital Inclusion Index (Thomas et al.), which measures digital inclusion across dimensions of access, ability, and affordability. Funded by Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications provider, and delivered in partnership with Greater Shepparton Secondary College (GSSC), the Connected Students program provided low-income households with a laptop and an unlimited broadband Internet connection for up to two years. Households were recruited to the project via GSSC. To be eligible, households needed to hold a health care card and have at least one child attending the school in year 10, 11, or 12. Both the student and a caregiver were required to participate in the project to be eligible. Additional household members were invited to take part in the research, but were not required to. (See Kennedy & Holcombe-James; and Kennedy et al., "Connected Students", for further details regarding household demographics.) The Australian Digital Inclusion Index identifies that affordability is a significant barrier to digital inclusion in Australia (Thomas et al.). The project’s objective was to measure how removing affordability barriers to accessing connectivity for households impacts on digital inclusion. By providing participating households with a free unlimited broadband internet connection for the duration of the research, the project removed the costs associated with digital access. Access alone is not enough to resolve the digital exclusion confronted by these low-income households. Digital exclusion in these instances is not derived simply from the cost of Internet access, but from the cost of digital devices. As a result, these households typically lacked sufficient digital devices. Each household was therefore provided both a high speed Internet connection, and a brand new laptop with built-in camera, microphone, and speakers (a standard tool kit for video conferencing). Data collection for the Connected Students project was intended to be conducted face-to-face. We had planned in-person observations including semi-structured interviews with household members conducted at three intervals throughout the project’s duration (beginning, middle, and end), and technology tours of each home to spatially and socially map device locations and uses (Kennedy et al., Digital Domesticity). As we readied to make our first research trip to commence the study, COVID-19 was wreaking havoc. It quickly became apparent we would not be travelling to work, much less travelling around the state. We thus pivoted to digital methods, with all our data collection shifting online to interviews conducted via digital platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams. While the pivot to digital methods saved travel hours, allowing us to scale up the number of households we planned to interview, it also demonstrated unexpected aspects of our participants’ lived experiences of digital exclusion. In this article, we draw on our first round of interviews which were conducted with 35 households over Zoom or Microsoft Teams during lockdown. The practice of conducting these interviews reveals insights into the barriers that households faced to digital research participation. In describing these experiences, we use pseudonyms for individual participants and refer to households using the pseudonym for the student participant from that household. Why Does Digital Inclusion Matter? Digital inclusion is broadly defined as universal access to the technologies necessary to participate in social and civic life (Helsper; Livingstone and Helsper). Although recent years have seen an increase in the number of connected households and devices (Thomas et al., “2020”), digital inclusion remains uneven. As elsewhere, digital disadvantage in the Australian context falls along geographic and socioeconomic lines (Alam and Imran; Atkinson et al.; Blanchard et al.; Rennie et al.). Digitally excluded population groups typically experience some combination of education, employment, income, social, and mental health hardship; their predicament is compounded by a myriad of important services moving online, from utility payments, to social services, to job seeking platforms (Australian Council of Social Service; Chen; Commonwealth Ombudsman). In addition to challenges in using essential services, digitally excluded Australians also miss out on the social and cultural benefits of Internet use (Ragnedda and Ruiu). Digital inclusion – and the affordability of digital access – should thus be a key concern for researchers looking to apply online methods. Households in the lowest income quintile spend 6.2% of their disposable income on telecommunications services, almost three times more than wealthier households (Ogle). Those in the lowest income quintile pay a “poverty premium” for their data, almost five times more per unit of data than those in the highest income quintile (Ogle and Musolino). As evidenced by the Australian Digital Inclusion Index, this is driven in part by a higher reliance on mobile-only access (Thomas et al., “2020”). Low-income households are more likely to access critical education, business, and government services through mobile data rather than fixed broadband data (Thomas et al., “2020”). For low-income households, digital participation is the top expense after housing, food, and transport, and is higher than domestic energy costs (Ogle). In the pursuit of responsible and ethical research, we caution against assuming research participants are able to bear the brunt of access costs in terms of having a suitable device, expending their own data resources, and having adequate skills to be able to complete the activity without undue stress. We draw examples from the Connected Students project to support this argument below. Findings: Barriers to Research Participation for Digitally Excluded Households If the Connected Students program had not provided participating households with a technology kit, their preexisting conditions of digital exclusion would have limited their research participation in three key ways. First, households with limited Internet access (particularly those reliant on mobile-only connectivity, and who have a few gigabytes of data per month) would have struggled to provide the data needed for video conferencing. Second, households would have struggled to participate due to a lack of adequate devices. Third, and critically, although the Connected Students technology kit provided households with the data and devices required to participate in the digital ethnography, this did not necessarily resolve the skills gaps that our households confronted. Data Prior to receiving the Connected Students technology kit, many households in our sample had limited modes of connectivity and access to data. For households with comparatively less or lower quality access to data, digital participation – whether for the research discussed here, or in contemporary life – came with very real costs. This was especially the case for households that did not have a home Internet connection and instead relied solely on mobile data. For these households, who carefully managed their data to avoid running out, participating in research through extended video conferences would have been impossible unless adequate financial reimbursement was offered. Households with very limited Internet access used a range of practices to manage and extend their data access by shifting internet costs away from the household budget. This often involved making use of free public Wi-Fi or library internet services. Ellie’s household, for instance, spent their weekends at the public library so that she and her sister could complete their homework. While laborious, these strategies worked well for the families in everyday life. However, they would have been highly unsuitable for participating in research, particularly during the pandemic. On the most obvious level, the expectations of library use – if not silent, then certainly quiet – would have prohibited a successful interview. Further, during COVID-19 lockdowns, public libraries (and other places that provide public Internet) became inaccessible for significant periods of time. Lastly, for some research designs, the location of participants is important even when participation is occurring online. In the case of our own project, the house itself as the site of the interview was critical as our research sought to understand how the layout and materiality of the home impacts on experiences of digital inclusion. We asked participants to guide us around their home, showing where technologies and social activities are colocated. In using the data provided by the Connected Students technology kit, households with limited Internet were able to conduct interviews within their households. For these families, participating in online research would have been near impossible without the Connected Students Internet. Devices Even with adequate Internet connections, many households would have struggled to participate due to a lack of suitable devices. Laptops, which generally provide the best video conferencing experience, were seen as prohibitively expensive for many families. As a result, many families did not have a laptop or were making do with a laptop that was excessively slow, unreliable, and/or had very limited functions. Desktop computers were rare and generally outdated to the extent that they were not able to support video conferencing. One parent, Melissa, described their barely-functioning desktop as “like part of the furniture more than a computer”. Had the Connected Students program not provided a new laptop with video and audio capabilities, participation in video interviews would have been difficult. This is highlighted by the challenges students in these households faced in completing online schooling prior to receiving the Connected Students kit. A participating student, Mallory, for example, explained she had previously not had a laptop, reliant only on her phone and an old iPad: Interviewer: Were you able to do all your homework on those, or was it sometimes tricky?Mallory: Sometimes it was tricky, especially if they wanted to do a call or something ... . Then it got a bit hard because then I would use up all my data, and then didn’t have much left.Interviewer: Yeah. Right.Julia (Parent): ... But as far as schoolwork, it’s hard to do everything on an iPad. A laptop or a computer is obviously easier to manoeuvre around for different things. This example raises several common issues that would likely present barriers to research participation. First, Mallory’s household did not have a laptop before being provided with one through the Connected Students program. Second, while her household did prioritise purchasing tablets and smartphones, which could be used for video conferencing, these were more difficult to navigate for certain tasks and used up mobile data which, as noted above, was often a limited resource. Lastly, it is worth noting that in households which did already own a functioning laptop, it was often shared between several household members. As one parent, Vanessa, noted, “yeah, until we got the [Connected Students] devices, we had one laptop between the four of us that are here. And Noel had the majority use of that because that was his school work took priority”. This lack of individuated access to a device would make participation in some research designs difficult, particularly those that rely on regular access to a suitable device. Skills Despite the Connected Students program’s provision of data and device access, this did not ensure successful research participation. Many households struggled to engage with video research interviews due to insufficient digital skills. While a household with Internet connectivity might be considered on the “right” side of the digital divide, connectivity alone does not ensure participation. People also need to have the knowledge and skills required to use online resources. Brianna’s household, for example, had downloaded Microsoft Teams to their desktop computer in readiness for the interview, but had neglected to consider whether that device had video or audio capabilities. To work around this restriction, the household decided to complete the interview via the Connected Students laptop, but this too proved difficult. Neither Brianna nor her parents were confident in transferring the link to the interview between devices, whether by email or otherwise, requiring the researchers to talk them through the steps required to log on, find, and send the link via email. While Brianna’s household faced digital skills challenges that affected both parent and student participants, in others such as Ariel’s, these challenges were focussed at the parental level. In these instances, the student participant provided a vital resource, helping adults navigate platforms and participate in the research. As Celeste, Ariel’s parent, explained, it's just new things that I get a bit – like, even on here, because your email had come through to me and I said to Ariel "We're going to use your computer with Teams. How do we do this?" So, yeah, worked it out. I just had to look up my email address, but I [initially thought] oh, my god; what am I supposed to do here? Although helpful in our own research given its focus on school-aged young people, this dynamic of parents being helped by their dependents illustrates that the adults in our sample were often unfamiliar with the digital skills required for video conferencing. Research focussing only on adults, or on households in which students have not developed these skills through extended periods of online education such as occurred during the COVID-19 lockdowns, may find participants lacking the digital skills to participate in video interviews. Participation was also impacted upon by participants' lack of more subtle digital skills around the norms and conventions of video conferencing. Several households, for example, conducted their interviews in less ideal situations, such as from both moving and parked cars. A portion of the household interview with Piper’s household was completed as they drove the 30 minutes from their home into Shepperton. Due to living out of town, this household often experienced poor reception. The interview was thus regularly disrupted as they dropped in and out of range, with the interview transcript peppered with interjections such as “we’re going through a bit of an Internet light spot ... we’re back ... sorry ...” (Karina, parent). Finally, Piper switched the device on which they were taking the interview to gain a better connection: “my iPad that we were meeting on has worse Internet than my phone Internet, so we kind of changed it around” (Karina). Choosing to participate in the research from locations other than the home provides evidence of the limited time available to these families, and the onerousness of research participation. These choices also indicate unfamiliarity with video conferencing norms. As digitally excluded households, these participants were likely not the target of popular discussions throughout the pandemic about optimising video conferences through careful consideration of lighting, background, make-up and positioning (e.g. Lasky; Niven-Phillips). This was often identified by how participants positioned themselves in front of the camera, often choosing not to sit squarely within the camera lens. Sometimes this was because several household members were participating and struggled to all sit within view of the single device, but awkward camera positioning also occurred with only one or two people present. A number of interviews were initially conducted with shoulders, or foreheads, or ceilings rather than “whole” participants until we asked them to reposition the device so that the camera was pointing towards their faces. In noting this unfamiliarity we do not seek to criticise or apportion responsibility for accruing such skills to participating households, but rather to highlight the impact this had on the type of conversation between researcher and participant. Such practices offer valuable insight into how digital exclusion impacts on individual’s everyday lives as well as on their research participation. Conclusion Throughout the pandemic, digital methods such as video conferencing have been invaluable for researchers. However, while these methods have enabled fieldwork to continue despite COVID-19 disruptions, the shift to online platforms has important and under-acknowledged implications for who is and is not able to participate in research. In this article, we have drawn on our research with low-income households to demonstrate the barriers that such cohorts experience when participating in online research. Without the technology kits provided as part of our research design, these households would have struggled to participate due to a lack of adequate data and devices. Further, even with the kits provided, households faced additional barriers due to a lack of digital literacy. These experiences raise a number of questions that we encourage researchers to consider when designing methods that avoid in person interactions, and when reviewing studies that use similar approaches: who doesn’t have the technological access needed to participate in digital and online research? What are the implications of this for who and what is most visible in research conducted during the pandemic? Beyond questions of access, to what extent will disadvantaged populations not volunteer to participate in online research because of discomfort or unfamiliarity with digital tools and norms? When low-income participants are included, how can researchers ensure that participation does not unduly burden them by using up precious data resources? And, how can researchers facilitate positive and meaningful participation among those who might be less comfortable interacting through mediums like video conferencing? In raising these questions we acknowledge that not all research will or should be focussed on engaging with disadvantaged cohorts. Rather, our point is that through asking questions such as this, we will be better able to reflect on how data and participant samples are being impacted upon by shifts to digital methods during COVID-19 and beyond. As researchers, we may not always be able to adapt Zoom-based methods to be fully inclusive, but we can acknowledge this as a limitation and keep it in mind when reporting our findings, and later when engaging with the research that was largely conducted online during the pandemic. 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