For many years the key tool of the ethnographer was the pencil and notepad. Ethnographers observed subjects, learned from their observations, made notes, reviewed their notes, and produced written reports of their findings – possibly spiced up with handful of photographs. Ethnography was expensive and produced output that was no more convincing than the output from traditional focus groups or depths. Sometime in the mid-90s ethnographers started using video to capture key moments of their observations, and as technologies advanced quickly switched to capturing 100s of hours of real-life video footage.
The output from ethnography ceased to be the traditional report and PowerPoint and started to include video clips from the project, something which massively increased to power of the communication. Increasingly, the output from an ethnography project includes a ‘leave behind’ DVD, which encapsulates the project. A good example of this was presented by Neil Mcphee and Graeme Chrystal (to the 2006 ESOMAR Congress in London), where they reported how they provided their client with a 30 minute DVD which captured the key elements of 200 hours of video, collected as part of an ethnography study into the daily lives of osteoarthritis sufferers.
Video is now a routine part of qualitative presentations, helping to bring alive the findings of focus groups, depth interviews, usability exercises, and ethnography. Companies such as FocusVision are finding there is a growing market for their remote viewing of focus groups service, where the video can be piped to 100s or even 1000s of observer, spread around the world.
The next step in the utilisation of video is tagging and searching. For example, when P&G capture a focus group using FocusVision it goes into their database and can be viewed by people all over the world, at different times and places. These viewers will add their tags to the video allowing future viewers or researchers to use these tags to acess the key insights.
Tagging is already showing itself as a key part of the new Internet. This use will grow and tagging will become more important, as will the power to search video on an image basis.
Quantitative research risks becoming increasingly boring by comparison with qualitiative research, despite its ability to be more representative. Initiatives are being taken to try and add the power of video to quantitative research. One move is to try and use respondents’ web cams to record video comments during interviews, another is to get respondents to use their cameras to upload images or video clips – for example ‘show me an example of the sort of person you think would use this brand’.
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