Thanks for your input in advance!
I think this is a great question to answer with qualitative research, and I would plan to do multiple observations and in-depth interviews at the outset. I think this data will significantly enhance your survey data.
With respect to subjects, I worry that you are going to have a biased sample towards young, relatively healthy subjects who are comfortable with the internet (as opposed to older, sicker adults who don't feel up to looking at an app). When you choose subjects to interview, I would be mindful of trying to enroll diverse subjects based on age, severity of illness, education, and SES. I love the idea of doing observations of patients interacting with the site, because you may have some patients who get frustrated and quit before getting to your survey or interview and their experiences wouldn't be captured otherwise. I wonder, though, if there's a way to capture the "observation" without your being in the room/ready to help? one question I would have for an app like this is: do patients miss the human contact that it may be replacing? If you are there as an observer with the device, you can't capture this aspect of intervention.
Lastly, your research question is about patient's "perceptions" of their hospital stay, which often aren't formed until after their visit. I'd consider doing followup interviews with both the intervention and control groups to better answer this question.
Sounds like a very interesting project to improve patient education and engagement. A survey seems appropriate for answering this research question. One possibility to expand the project scope is to ask a couple more open ended questions. This would give the project more of a mixed methods angle as opposed to being more purely quantitative in its present form. You can then analyze these open ended responses in a qualitative fashion with coding and deriving themes. If you have an open ended section, the method of survey administration may become more important (paper vs mobile device) as people might be more willing to write out answers but less likely to type them in on a mobile device.
Making a survey as easy to follow as possible so that each subject is actually answering the intended question can be tricky. I think running it by a few patients first is a great idea. You can also show it to persons unfamiliar with the project to ask if there are any confusing terms. One term that might be interpreted differently (though maybe this is clear if you look at the website) is the concept of "non-medical questions" and what this encompasses.
This is a great project! nicely written.
My main feedback is that this is not really a qualitative project.
Re: the research question "does" is a more quantitative question, you could consider changing to "how does Hosplife affect..." Qualitative research questions is particularly good at answering questions such as who, what, when, where, how...
methods that are qualitative that you could add to your survey include observation as you mentioned, do interviews with participants that are more open ended, or having even open-response items in your survey that you could analyze qualitatively.
(and for assignment 3, you can focus on more details of a qualitative component of your study, while mentioning that it is in the context of this larger study that involves the survey)
I think I had the same question as others regarding the quantitative part vs the qualitative part. I think the observation of use of the application is clearly qualitative. It might be helpful to highlight/bring that aspect out more in your abstract. Also curious as to how you plan to triangulate the results between the quantitative vs qualitative.