The authors have used video diaries extensively in corporate ethnography and have found them to be an essential tool in the collection of observational data in health care and consumer research. Drawing on their experience, the chapter explores video diaries’ practical uses in ethnographic research, detailing their strengths and weaknesses in the types of research questions they can help answer and the kinds of data they produce. The chapter also serves as a guide to incorporating video diaries into ethnographic and qualitative research, offering practical advice on topics including video diary guides, communication strategies with participants, and the advantages and disadvantages of mobile phone diaries versus free-standing camcorder diaries.

This chapter seeks to advance the debate on digital research methods beyond the opposition between ‘face to face’ or online ethnography. Our focus will be on the practical experience of doing online ethnography, alongside how traditional and online ethnography can be integrated through the ideal of ‘being there’ i.e., direct observation. Christine Hine (2016: 257) notes that “the study of Internet interactions became popular in the 1990s.” We explore what is understood as authentic ethnography between the online and the offline through critically observing what is comfortable and uncomfortable in both worlds to argue that as a method and theory ethnography adapts.

With the advent of COVID-19, adaptation became a norm. Research data-collection methods similarly required adaptation, birthing the use of virtual platforms as first-line data collection tools to adhere to COVID-19 restrictions. This chapter presents an autoethnographic account of virtual qualitative data collection. A PhD candidate shares her experience of conducting individual and focus group interviews virtually in a developing nation. A discussion of the narrative and recommendations for virtual qualitative data collection are provided.