Introduction

Illuminating everyday realities: The significance of video methods for social science and health research

Rowena Forsyth
Centre for Values, Ethics and The Law in Medicine (VELiM), Faculty of Medicine, University of Sydney, Sydney NSW

Katherine E Carroll
School of Sociology and Social Policy, Faculty of Arts, University of Sydney, Sydney NSW

Paul Reitano
School of Education, University of New England, Armidale NSW

PP: 214 - 217

Article Text

This introduction prefaces the papers that comprise this special issue entitled 'Using Video in Social Science and Health Research' (ISBN 978-1-921348-24-2). This issue contributes to a recent burgeoning of interest in, and use of, video based methodologies in the health and social sciences. This collection of papers, received from Austria, Australia and the United Kingdom, shows video-recording to be a truly multidisciplinary resource that is adopted to assist research into diverse contexts and topics, involving collaborative engagements with research participants from all walks of life. Video methodologies are clearly creative, evolving, challenging and rewarding.

With many people using video cameras to record important life events, lay access to video recording equipment is common. In turn, popular video recordings are frequently shared on websites where they are accessed not only by people known to the participants or recorder, but by unknown individuals in a myriad of geographic locations. People are increasingly accustomed to having their everyday lives recorded, often with the understanding that the footage may be viewed by numerous other people. To use video recordings in research is to harness this wider cultural aspect which in turn can reveal the complexities of everyday experiences and realities.

Introducing the Papers of the Special Issue

The majority of papers in this special issue adopt a participatory approach to investigating the daily experiences of participants. For example, Foster's project saw her become a fellow member with her participants in the production of video accounts about parenting in circumstances of economic disadvantage (2009). A participatory approach also features in the applications of video research in this issue that are informed by ethnography. For instance, three papers contribute to the development of two specific methodologies: 'video ethnography' and 'video-reflexivity' in Australian tertiary hospital settings. Carroll (2009) uses a feminist theoretical framework to unpack aspects of power embedded in the relationship between the researcher, participants and the video camera in video ethnography and video-reflexivity. Forsyth's paper identifies the way that differing modalities of engagement with the video camera during video ethnography led to two participant groups performing, accounting for and redesigning their work in contrasting ways. Iedema and colleagues' research (2009) engaged clinicians in reflexive viewing of their work, which led clinicians to creatively redesign problematic aspects of their handover practices. In a similar vein, Grant and Luxford (2009) video child and family health nurses interacting with migrant mothers and ask the nurses to watch the footage to assist in their reflection on intercultural communication practices. Each of these papers emphasise the value of clinician-led learning and practice change that result from the research adopting these methods.

Also using video with clinicians, Leap and colleagues' paper (2009) incorporated video recordings of consultations and discussions with women, carers and health professionals as one component of an instrumental tool for training midwives and other health care professionals. The study showed that incorporating video methods with text based resources facilitated interactive inter-professional learning to a greater extent than would have been possible with a solely text-based tool. This highlights a broader trend empiricised by this special issue: a shift in qualitative social science research from a reliance on text-based data collection, analysis, and dissemination to more dialogic, evolving methodologies.

Lammer's research (2009) also utilised video recordings of patients and clinicians. Her paper in this issue shows how the combination of video, visual art, interviews and ethnography richly conveyed the experiences of women undergoing surgical treatment for breast cancer. By presenting these accounts to clinicians, Lammer aimed to enhance the emotional communicative competence of clinicians (2009). The ability of video recordings to account for aesthetics serves to cross the divide between art and data, and the textual and photographic forms; a point we have sought to highlight by including visual plates throughout this issue.

Participant Learning: Using Video Reflexively With Participants

Six of the seven papers in the issue utilise video data for learning, either in the form of participants learning more about their own practices or as a way of educating others. Five articles featured various degrees of 'playing back' video data to participants, providing them with the opportunity to analyse, share, discuss, and even problem- solve their daily practices. For instance, Grant and Luxford (2009) played back video recordings to child and family nurse participants, asking them to examine their professional skills and then reflect on the way they negotiated intercultural aspects of their interactions with migrant families. Carroll (2009) used video-reflexive viewing sessions to facilitate greater understanding of nurse-rostering complexities among nurses, and improve doctors' handover communication practices in an Intensive Care Unit. Forsyth conducted reflexive viewing with laboratory scientists who subsequently uncovered systemic problems in the new information technology system implemented in the hospital. Iedema and colleagues (2009) utilised reflexive viewing to enable clinicians in an emergency department and intensive care service to critically appraise and creatively redesign handover practices. Similarly, Leap and colleagues' (2009) and Lammer's research (2009) serves to alter clinicians' perspectives that privilege technical clinical competence over emotional care by drawing attention to social and interactional aspects of patient perspectives and experiences.

Using video data reflexively enables the development of an engaged, dialogic relationship with research participants (Iedema & Carroll, in press). It serves to firmly locate expertise about practice (and the possibilities for its redesign) with participants (Carroll, Iedema & Kerridge 2008; Iedema, Forsyth et al. 2007; Iedema, Long et al. 2006). Importantly, this means that researchers do not place themselves as the only experts of how and why things should be improved. Video-based research can facilitate a crossing of the divide between data and analysis, and instead produce a 'data-in-analysis', where participants account for, and explain, their practices as they are performing them for the camera. In particular, in this issue Carroll (2009) also argues for reflexivity to extend to the researcher and his/her own research practices to be a fundamental part of the video ethnography and video reflexive methodologies.

Marginalised Participants and Power

Video recording can give a voice to individuals who are located at the fringe of popular images or professional practice and whose perspectives are muted in relation to these dominant discourses and groups (Long, Forsyth et al. 2006). Video also provides a way of examining power relations within the research process (Kindon 2003; Pink 2001). In this issue, Carroll (2009) and Grant and Luxford (2009) each apply theoretical frameworks of feminism and decolonisation, respectively, to challenge existing assumptions about the relationship of the researcher to the researched and, therefore, the way video methods are used in data collection.

The potential for a democratic use of video methodology is demonstrated by the papers in this issue which have focused on marginalised communities. Foster (2009) examined the experiences of poor working class mothers; Lammer (2009) highlights the vulnerabilities of breast cancer patients' whilst Leap and colleagues (2009) aimed to give voice to women's preferences for normal childbirth. Two studies focused on marginalised professional voices. Forsyth's study (2009) of scientists (who are located in a lower hierarchical position than doctors in the hospital) took advantage of the study to rectify their marginalised voices in organisational decision-making. Grant and Luxford (2009) attended to the role nurses perform in their negotiated care delivery to immigrant (and in some cases, refugee) families from non-English speaking backgrounds.

Conclusion

The papers in this special issue draw attention to how video data can capture much of the messiness and concomitant richness of social life. This in turn reminds us of the highly contextual nature of the type of research we do and the way that it is impossible for instances of practice and individuals' experiences to be divorced from the context in which they occur. The capability of video recording to capture audio and video simultaneously affords researchers and participants the ability to analyse the complexities of how people interact with their environment. We argue that Bottorff's (1994) conceptualisation of the advantage of video recording's density and permanence needs to be extended so as to include the advantage of relationality that comes with participatory uses of video in research.

Participants find ways of utilising the technical capabilities of the video camera as a way of telling their stories. They are aware of the camera videoing them and their practices, and rather than altering their behaviours to appear more favourable or competent, use the camera to narrate and demonstrate their experiences for themselves and/or for researchers and other outsiders. In this way the video becomes a tool for participants to give voice to their life world and reflect back to themselves the underlying cultural, social, professional and organisational frameworks that underpin their ongoing everyday realties, of which the recorded instances are but individual examples. In doing so, the meanings of these practices are co-produced by researchers and participants. It is for this reason that we find participatory video methods to be so rewarding as researchers.

We wish to thank the numerous peer reviewers and the authors of submitted papers for their insights that have led to the production of this special issue. We are hopeful that the issue will make a contribution to the existing discourse on video methodologies and may encourage other researchers to take up this evolving methodology.

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