Pink’s (2007) article introduced a phenomenological research method “walking with video” which means “walking with and video-recording participants as they experience, tell and show their material, immaterial and social environments in personally, socially and culturally specific way.” (p. 240) One example of this research method is Lund and Lorimer’s fieldwork research with mountaineers, in which the researchers followed, videotaped and interviewed the participants in order to investigate their sense of vision and gaze by examining the body that moved and touched the ground. The core value of this method is that the external environment is flux rather than static, the material and immaterial elements are interacting with each other, and places should be considered as continually changing “event”. As for the functions and implications of “walking with video”, it can produce empathetic and sensory embodied understanding of others’ experience, as well as audiovisual texts that define the place in one moment. In addition, the method per se can be productive to a place, which is called “place-making” in this paper.
This method seems to be one variation of observation. However, unlike normal observation which is usually used as a method in phenomenology and ethnography which enable researchers to interpret the experience of participants in the researchers’ perspective, “walking with video” emphasize that participants’ experience and cognition should be understood in their own standpoint. I think this contributes a lot to reducing researchers’ subjectivity while attempting to understand other people’s behavior. Another significant feature of this method is that it stresses the mutual interaction between people and environments, together with the changes they impose on each other, admitting the flux nature of the world. I think this is what makes it different from interview which only enables researchers to explore participants’ cognition but neglects the changing and influencing process. In terms of data collection and analysis, interview only involves audio sense while in “walking with video” lots of senses are involved including texture, vision and so on. In one word, “walking with video” provides researchers with more resources to interpret and analyze subjects’ experience.
I think this method can contribute a lot in certain research fields like cultural study. However, one limitation is that it can only be applied to small-scale research, for example, case study. Even if in case study, it can take researchers a lot of time and resources compared to normative methods like interview and observation.
Hi YuXi,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your summary of this phenomenological research method. It is interesting to see how, like the method used in my reading (photography), this method provides a “snapshot”, frozen in time, of the participant’s experience and so is a “historical text”. It captures moments and provides opportunities to examine the affective nature of experience; however, different to using photography, walking with video seeks to encompass the additional haptic (sense of touch) nature of the encounter being studied. As you say, this is different to interviews in that the “real time” sensory experience is taken into consideration rather than being reflected on after the fact, and that walking with video “provides researchers with more resources to interpret and analyze subjects’ experience”. It also allows the researchers to learn “empathetically about their experiences” as they are, being situated within the same environment, experiencing similar sensory inputs to the subjects. This kind of understanding of the author’s situation can then enable the audience to “enter” the study too in that it can be “interpreted empathetically”
I’m interested in your comment that this method contributes to “reducing researchers’ subjectivity”. I can see how this could be true to some extent in that both the researcher and subject(s) are sharing the same experience in terms of their senses. However, subjectivity could still be significant because people will likely react to / interpret the sensory inputs in different ways. It does seem like an intimate form of research though as both the subjects and researcher as kind of situated within the experience. I appreciated also when you mentioned that this kind of research might be limited to small-scale research, in contrast to interviews, in that the more participants there are, the less likely the study can have that intimacy of a shared experience. I guess there’s a limit on how many subjects can be included in this way, though larger groups could be accommodated by looking at the shared encounter in a broader way with a larger variety of interpretations of the experience.
Hi Yuxi,
ReplyDeleteOne of the questions I had as I was reading your summary was if the video had voice attached to it or was it a silent representation as to what was happening? It certainly would make the observations of the researchers quite different, I would think.
I was also interested in how the researchers decided on what would be the focus or subject of the research project and how they decided on who they would study. As you can perhaps gather from my comments, I am not so much interested in the research itself but rather more on who the researchers are, who those being researched are and their relationships with each other. Human relationships are what have always interested me but I have never had any desire to research the subject...fortunate for the world of academia, I think!
So interesting! I am really enjoying these discussions.
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