Imagine…….. going on an ethnographic fieldwork assignment with a selection of your brightest colleagues, specialist consultants, a client or two and even an assistant to help you manage and digest your notes and findings.
The EverydayLives process has been honed over the last 14 years into a methodology which is inclusive, collaborative and allows rich insights, subject to the quality of the collaboration and thinking taking place.
A guiding principle of our process is the naturalistic capture or recording of everyday life events, happenings and conversations. We do not conduct interviews (on conversations around captured observations) and in many cases, we don’t even tell respondents what we are interested in learning about when we follow them about their everyday lives.
In parallel to honing our process we have also strived to find ways of making our way of doing things as efficient as possible – with limited success. Let us explain…
Here follows the EverydayLives process:
1 On being commissioned, we have a kick off meeting with our client to agree objectives, themes and, critically, a ‘must capture’ list of key events without which our objectives cannot be met.
2 We begin recruitment. We insist on pen portraits for each respondent (as well as the completed screener) so clients can give final sign off based on not just a questionnaire.
3 Fieldwork begins. Usually this means one ethnographic film maker spending between 1 and 3 days with a subject wherever they go and whatever they do from dawn ‘til dusk.
4 A Question Generation Workshop takes place after the first few household days have been completed. The purpose of the QGW is for all concerned to watch the roughly edited films (no interviews yet) and come up with questions they would like to put to respondents. A conversational guide is created following the QGW for client to approve. 5
5 Each subject is revisited and participates in a co-discovery. They are shown films of themselves – the very same one shown in the QGW – and asked to a) narrate them and b) explore topics and themes outlined in the conversational guide.
6 Now follows a number of weeks of parallel analysis, interpretation, film editing and dubbing of recorded co-discovery sessions to specific sections of film.
7 The final deliverable is a two phase workshop starting with themed insights each supported by short clips from across some or all of the subjects. The final phase is a moderated implication finding workshop where the learning’s, insights and meanings from phase 1 are translated, with clients, in breakout groups, into next step actions for the team.
In creating our app, our key challenge was to shorten the timescale and therefore cost of the above process while retaining as much of its richness and collaborative underpinning as possible. And in achieving this, enable qualitative researchers who are unwilling or unable to use cameras and editing software to conduct their own ethnographic explorations too.
Welcome to our App which is being continuously honed thanks to valuable feedback we are receiving from users (and acting on). A web based application will be available soon to help users analyse, filter, share and present their findings on returning from the field.
WHY WE CREATED THIS APP
Click to view our process film
We designed the specifications, as much as possible, around our existing process. That said, we know anyone, including research respondents, who needs to capture and immediately share events so that collaborators/followers can help to generate questions, meanings and learning’s will find our App invaluable.
Specifications/Main Steps:
Create a Project and give it a name
Give it a project ID. This will allow event updates to be recognised by an associated web based service we are developing
Create your themes. These are the topics or ‘must captures’ you will be observing and exploring with your subjects
Add followers or collaborators. These may be clients, colleagues or even consultants you are using specially for your study. Each time you capture an event and send it, your followers will be able to view and respond.
Describe your family members.
Click on New Entry to
- Choose you capture medium (video, picture, audio and text)
- Choose the theme(s) you wish to attach to your captured event
- Automatically fix the location and time
Once an event is captured, press send, share or save. Send will email your event to your collaborators. Save will save the event to your device for later synching and Share, once the web based service for our app is completed, will allow you to share clips which are not sensitive but nonetheless insightful, to be shared with the wider research community – you decide how wide.
From within the App. it is possible to quickly and easily view all of the events captured in chronological order.
It is also possible to add a description to each event before it is sent and shared.
In practice
I have spent weeks testing the app in both live project and test situations and have to honestly say I am thrilled with how intuitive, fun and useful this App is to use. The kind of testing I carried out can be described as destruction testing or seeing what it takes to make it crash. Three versions later and we have an application that has
- frozen on me only twice in three weeks – which is excellent by any standard
- never lost a captured event – despite the two freezes. Events I thought I had lost would be found in the ‘sending’ folder of my mailbox
- only slowed down when I am trying to add themes to a long clips while it’s encoding before being sent
Slowing down was a big source of frustration no matter how little time it took. The simple rule was the longer the video, the longer it took to encode.
My first response was to try and establish an optimum maximum film length which would not impact attachment of themes. This turned out to be a surprisingly long 90 seconds. Stay within that time window, and encoding has little to no impact on adding themes. In case you are wondering, 90 seconds to capture events and occasions is a very long time. And given we want to minimise or altogether eliminate film production and editing, a 90 second window is excellent discipline to work within.
A very simple solution
It came to me by accident. I was adding some new themes while setting up a new project when I wondered what would happen if I first selected my themes and then made my film. Since sending was the final task after making my clip I experienced no slowdown whatsoever even with much longer films. This may be a counterintuitive way of capturing events to some, but if you see a TV viewing/web surfing multi tasking occasion unfolding, it is very easy to choose the ‘multi task’ theme and then make your film. Once made press send and move on to the next event.
90 Second video
In order to make this app. fool proof, I have decided to limit the video length to 90 seconds. It will not be restrictive and it will force you to think economically about what and how much you capture.
Remember, this App. is not to make films with. It is to capture events with. If you want to make a film, use a video camera. That said, if I receive enough complaints, I may increase or even eliminate the time limit. But users must remember to input their themes before making a film to avoid slowing down.