WhatsApp is a popular platform primarily for informal communication. It has 1.5 billion users worldwide. Though there are increasing numbers of studies looking at the use of WhatsApp in various formal settings, its use in social research remains under-studied. We have used WhatsApp in several research projects. In this article, we analyse our use of WhatsApp within two studies conducted in 2019. We analysed the content of messages and counted the messages sent by each member to our WhatsApp groups. We also analysed the feedback received from our research assistants on the use of WhatsApp groups in research. We show in this article that WhatsApp has created new opportunities for better communication and management of fieldwork to meet a tight schedule and that this improved the overall quality of the project. We offer lessons learned for improving the use of WhatsApp in research processes.

WhatsApp是主要用于非正式沟通的流行平台。它在全球拥有15亿用户。尽管越来越多的研究着眼于在各种正式环境中使用WhatsApp，但在社会研究中仍未对其进行充分研究。我们已在多个研究项目中使用过WhatsApp。在本文中，我们在2019年进行的两项研究中分析了对WhatsApp的使用。我们分析了消息的内容并计算了每个成员向WhatsApp组发送的消息。我们还分析了从研究助手那里收到的有关WhatsApp组在研究中的使用情况的反馈。我们在本文中证明，WhatsApp为更好地沟通和管理实地工作创造了新的机会，以满足紧迫的进度，这提高了项目的整体质量。