Using Video in Social Sciences and Health Research
Special Issue of Multiple Research Approaches
Volume 3 Issue 3 December 2009
ii+126 pages ISBN 978-1-921348-24-2
Advisory Editors:
Rick Iedema, University of Technology, Sydney
Christian Heath, Kings College, London; and
Alexandra Juhasz, Pitzer College, Claremont CA, USA
Guest Editors:
Rowena Forsyth, University of New South Wales
Katherine Carroll, University of Technology, Sydney; and
Paul Reitano, University of New England, Australia
For the social scientist, the use of video raises important questions about how video images are produced and used alongside other research methods including observation, interviewing and textual analysis. This special issue seeks to explore the innovative methodologies, data and research outcomes that result from the incorporation of video with
Using Video in Social Science and Health Research seeks to draw together researchers from a range of health (including medicine, nursing, psychology and counselling) and social science (including management, education, legal and social work) disciplines to present a range of methodological and ethical issues that come to bear on the way video is utilised. These issues include, but are certainly not limited to:
- Ethical considerations in video research
- Visual representation
- Recording the usual and the extraordinary
- Data manipulation and selection
- Use of technology in qualitative research
- Video as part of multiple methods research
- Opportunities for participant engagement with the visual
- Relationships between researchers, participants and the video; and
- Implications of the highly identifiable nature of video recorded data and participant anonymity for research relationships and outcomes
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.
This issue of International Journal of Multiple Research Approaches (IJMRA) aims to make a contribution to video research methodology that reflects the increasing use of video that is currently occurring across a diverse range of research disciplines. It 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.
This Special Issue is designed to contribute to the existing discourse on video methodologies and also to encourage researchers to take up this evolving methodology.
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