Run a voice and text diary study without building the tools for it.
Caracal handles the parts of a diary study that are hard to build and easy to get wrong: questions that open on time, recordings kept until they’re sent, consent that’s versioned, and data you can check before you export it.
Set it up once.
Write a few questions, choose daily or weekly, and preview each question the way participants will meet it.
- Write questions that take a spoken answer, a written one, or either; any question can be optional.
- Schedule them daily or weekly, with an answer window and the study’s time zone.
- Write the consent text; publish a new version and ask people who agreed to an earlier one to agree again.
- Name the research-team contact and the ethics reference participants see.
See who’s answering, and who needs you.
A diary study lives or dies on people keeping it up. The Score shows the whole study on one page and brings forward the people to check in with.
- The Score shows every person and every week on one page, drawn as a line of what they said.
- It brings forward who needs you: people gone quiet, not yet joined, or who withdrew.
- Send a check-in, the study’s standard note or your own words, at most once a week per person.
Read and listen as answers arrive.
Analysis can start in week one. Excerpts, highlights and memos stay with the answers they belong to.
- Read and listen by week, by person or by question.
- Add transcripts from your own workflow as a CSV, one row per answer; with word timings, they follow the recording word by word.
- Mark excerpts, highlight words and keep memos on any answer; they travel with the export.
Data you can check before you export it.
Every answer is a row with its whole record behind it: what was said, every take, how long it took and which consent it was given under.
- Every answer is a row in the Response table: search what people said, check each recording, open the record of any answer.
- Export exactly the answers in view as CSV, or the recordings as a ZIP.
- Each row carries the consent version the person had agreed to when they answered.
What it doesn’t do yet.
Caracal is in development. So you can plan around it, here is what it doesn’t do today.
- No automatic transcription yet: you add transcripts from your own workflow as a CSV.
- No native iPhone or Android app, and no push notifications: participants answer in the browser and get an email.
- No random (signal-contingent) prompting, sensors or passive data: questions open on a daily or weekly schedule.
- No AI analysis of answers.
- No direct connection to REDCap, Qualtrics or Prolific: exports are CSV, which opens anywhere.
Planning a diary study?
In development at the IDEEAS Lab and preparing supervised pilots. We are looking for research teams to run them with us. Tell us who takes part, how often and for how long.
Or write to akatz4@vt.edu