Postscript

The significance of video research methodology for health and social science

Alexandra (Alex) Juhasz
Media Studies, Media Department, Pitzer College, Claremont CA, United States of America

Christian Heath
Work, Interaction and Technology Research Centre, School of Social Science and Public Policy, King's College, London, United Kingdom

Rick Iedema
Centre for Health Communication, Faculty of Humanities and Social Science, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney NSW

PP: 321 - 324

Article Text

This concluding discussion presents reflections of the three advisory editors on the contributions of papers comprising this special issue. Each advisory editor considers their own work, its relationship to papers in this issue and prospective applications of video research methodology.

Alex

In the mid-1980s, a fresh-faced and eager young college grad, I moved to a bustling, gritty New York City to attend graduate school in Cinema Studies and chanced upon the first years of a global pandemic. I participated in the burgeoning AIDS activist movement as a video-maker and also as a developing scholar of ethnographic and documentary media. While making AIDS activist video for affected communities, particularly about and for women (who were not yet understood to be 'at risk'), I also engaged in scholarly writing about the forms, ethics and politics of activist video, culminating in AIDS TV: Identity, Community and Alternative Video (Juhasz 1995). Since then, my scholarly and artistic work has continued to focus on committed, feminist uses of video within movements for social justice. Thus, it is as an activist scholar and maker of video that I approach the diverse articles collected in this absorbing special issue on video research methodology in health and social science research.

Two issues are most compelling to me. The first is the real complexities and rewards of inter-disciplinarity; the second, the surprising reach of feminism. Reading the collected articles, I am duly impressed by the range of disciplines and approaches represented: ethics and law, sociology, education, social policy, nursing, health care. I also observe an active, dialogic engagement across these fields, as scholars mutually engage with the challenges and strengths of video as a new research tool. This noted, I find I am also keenly aware that humanists like myself, people who study the forms, histories, aesthetics, codes and theories of media, are largely absent. While this is understandable, given that the issue is designated for the Social Sciences, I do want to note how such institutionalized barriers limit all of our work. For instance, the compelling concepts of 'video-ethnography' and 'video-reflexivity' being explored in this issue have been covered by artists and scholars of video (and visual ethnography) with great enthusiasm beginning with the medium's invention in the late-1960s. As dialogue across these divides continue to improve, I hope Social Scientists can learn from our many discussions, in the arts and humanities, about the aesthetics of video - people always engage with video through expectations drawn from the formal traditions of mainstream (and alternative) media, with which they are entirely fluent - and as a politicized one, in that these forms carry social meanings in their own right of great relevance to the work described in these pages.

What remains uniquely moving to me is that all of the essays demonstrate an implicit or explicit relation to video that I understand as feminist. Of course many other inter-related schools of thought and action invested in reworking power also raise similar questions about how the camera and related technologies and practices of media like editing and viewing, forefront issues of cultural power and expertise as relayed through structures of distance and objectivity. But feminist theory and method has consistently named how practices of collaboration, reflexivity, participation, emotion and self-expression, enthusiastically discussed and debated across this issue, are ethical and intellectual correctives to the blind-spots of video, even as it so mimetically records whatever is in front of it. It has been great fun and fuel for thought, to read across the disciplinary divide and see social science researchers engage in what the editors call 'a shift in qualitative social science research from a reliance on text-based data collection, analysis and dissemination to more dialogic, evolving methodologies'. I only hope we will have many more such opportunities to engage dialogically across and between the arts, humanities and social sciences through our shared commitments to understanding and improving health care and its many linked issues of social justice.

Christian

It has long been recognised that video, and before that film, provide unique resources for the social sciences, enabling situated conduct and interaction to be documented and subject to scrutiny and analysis. In the social sciences, it is AC Haddon who is perhaps most frequently credited with having first used film in field work as part of the Torres Straits expedition in the 1890s, but as early as the 1870s Eadweard Muybridge used sequences of instantaneous photographies to expose character and organisation of human movement and action. Despite these early beginnings and the important contributions of scholars such as Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, and more generally anthropological film makers, it is only in the past two or perhaps three decades, perhaps with the advent of cheap and reliable video technologies that we witnessed a burgeoning corpus of research within the social sciences that uses visual media to explore, examine and reflect on culture, interaction and practice.

The papers gathered in this collection provide a highly distinctive contribution to our understanding of the use of video in social science research. In contrast to the growing range of video-based studies of interaction, communication and collaboration in work and organisational environments, studies that are primarily concerned with exploring the social organisation that informs a range of everyday activities, the papers in this issue adopt a more radical, engaged approach, using video as a medium through which participants, in close collaboration with academic researchers, examine and reflect on practice and communication. Taking health and welfare as a principal theme, the papers address a range of distinct activities and settings including for example intercultural communication in family health, the design of learning packages for maternity staff, 'handovers' in intensive care, the deployment of government programmes to ameliorate disadvantage and the incorporation of computerised information systems into medical and scientific work. They critically explore the ways in which everyday practice reveals particular standpoints, influences and assumptions, and professional, organisational and cultural commitments that pervade the activities in which people engage and shape their encounters with others. In these studies, video becomes a tool, a resource, a strategy, to enable participants to discover for themselves, in concert and collaboration with researchers, the tacit, the taken-for-granted, the individual and collective ways of being, seeing and working with clients and colleagues.

Whilst the papers in this special issue share a common commitment to using video as a resource for reflection, to engage participants in ethnography, the papers bring different perspectives and approaches to bear upon the settings and concerns they address. Indeed each of the papers provides a methodological contribution and a range of insights and ideas into the ways in which video can inform an engaged, collaborative and reflexive analysis. In turn these contributions provide insights into practice, organisation and learning that bears upon contemporary developments in the social sciences in particular research and method in the disciplines of education professional studies and health and social policy.

Rick

Each paper in this special issue confirms video ethnography to be both a critical and a practical development in contemporary social research. Video-ethnography is presented as a means to traversing the boundaries between researcher and researched and between knowing and doing. Some papers push the methodological implications of these traversals (eg Carroll 2009; Forsyth 2009), while others pursue their practical effects (eg Leap et al. 2009; Lammer 2009; Grant & Luxford 2009; Foster 2009). All papers challenge us to think about what they created and found, how they exploited the visual and how to understand the relationships they initiated.

The principal theoretical point that drives this special issue, as I see it, is that researching social phenomena is no longer purely the preserve of the researcher on her own. Both producing and interpreting footage can now involve those who populate the social domain targeted by the research. Those filmed can now also include the researcher herself (Carroll 2009). The researcher can now put her visual selections, readings and editings at risk by showing them back to the researched, eliciting their views on the footage and the research process as a whole. Such multidirectional dialogue and feedback creates new ways of knowing and new ways of relating (Iedema et al, 2009). This paradigm of involving the researched in visual production and interpretation creates an immediacy that at once 'affects' the social domains where it is deployed.

The principal practical feat that these studies accomplish is that they enter highly challenging social domains: social or cultural marginalisation, changing birth practices, the dynamics of hospital care. The point of initiating dialogue in these domains is to deliberately perturb existing ways of being, doing and saying. Research that is done in this register seeks out its actual and potential 'Hawthorne effects', targeting responsiveness from those populating the domain to the invitation to engage in dialogue and co-production. To date, experimentation has dominated in medical science where it mobilises 'stable' entities (the drug; the surgical intervention) for tests on 'standardised' recipients (patients, bodies, organs) to produce context-free truths (evidence). The present special issue foregrounds experimentation that thrives on opportunistic choices, role reversals and democratising media. Along the way, everyone's assumptions are reinvented as they revisit what they are doing, entering new visual, methodological and practical possibilities. This is investigative complexity folding into complex social domains - experiments in pursuit of intervention, pushed by affect and impulse as much as driven by disciplinary procedure and theoretical interest.

Affect comes to the fore here because the distances between filming, being filmed, viewing and editing are rapidly evaporating. Witness the increasing pervasiveness of camera technologies, editing facilities and viewing opportunities. All this intensifies the ongoing compression of filming/ editing/viewing into a single space, entwining those behind and those in front of the camera in a head-spin of possibilities and discoveries. In this space, we encounter and create new perspectives, angles, feelings and involvements. It is a space where the visual is exploited for its capacity to move. And for us and for the authors of these papers, being moved is as real as it is theoretically significant and methodologically exploited and exploitable.

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