A lack of mess? Advice on undertaking video-mediated participant observations
Journal of Organizational Ethnography
ISSN: 2046-6749
Article publication date: 24 December 2021
Issue publication date: 4 November 2022
Abstract
Purpose
This article offers practical advice to ethnographers venturing into doing participant observations through, but not about, videoconferencing applications such as Zoom, for which the methods literature offers little guidance.
Design/methodology/approach
The article stems from a research project about a BioMedical Design Fellowship. As the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the Fellowship converted all teaching activities to online learning via Zoom, and the participant observations followed along. Taking an autoethnographic approach, the authors present and discuss concrete examples of encountered obstacles produced by the video-mediated format, such as limited access and interactions, technical glitches and changing experiences of embodiment.
Findings
Changing embodiment in particular initially led the authors to believe that the “messiness” of ethnography (i.e. misunderstandings, emotions, politics, self-doubts etc.) was lost online. However, over time the authors realized that the mess was still there, albeit in new manifestations, because Zoom shaped the interactions of the people the authors observed, the observations the authors could make and how the authors related to research participants and vice versa.
Practical implications
The article succinctly summarizes the key advice offered by the researchers (see Section 5) based on their experiences of converting on-site ethnographic observations into video-mediated observations enabling easy use by other researchers in relation to other projects and contexts.
Originality/value
The article positions video-mediated observations, via e.g. Zoom, which are distinctly characterised by happening in real time and having an object of study other than the online sphere itself, vis-à-vis other “online ethnography” methods. The article further aims to enable researchers to more rapidly rediscover and re-incite the new manifestations of the messiness of ethnography online, which is key to ensuring high-quality research.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, the authors wish to thank the director, staff and fellows of the BioMedical Design Novo Nordisk Fellowship Programme for welcoming us into their on- and offline lives. It has been a true privilege. Second, the authors want to thank the organizers and participants of the virtual “Coping with Messiness in Ethnography” workshop (May 2021), without which this article would not exist. Finally, many thanks to the anonymous reviewers whose careful engagement with the text and insightful comments enabled the authors to significantly strengthen their arguments and contribution.
This research is supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation. Grant number: NNF18SA0034896.
Citation
Høg Utoft, E., Kusk Søndergaard, M. and Bendtsen, A.-K. (2022), "A lack of mess? Advice on undertaking video-mediated participant observations", Journal of Organizational Ethnography, Vol. 11 No. 3, pp. 243-258. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOE-07-2021-0037
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited