Remote Fieldwork in Homes During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Video-Call Ethnography and Map Drawing Methods

Abstract

Restrictions on physical movements and in-person encounters during the COVID-19 crisis confronted many qualitative researchers with challenges in conducting and completing projects requiring face-to-face fieldwork. An exploration of engaging in what we term ‘agile research’ in such circumstances can offer novel methodological insights for researching the social world. In this article, we discuss the changes we made to our ethnographic fieldwork in response to the introduction of a national lockdown to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus. The ‘Living with Personal Data’ project, based in Sydney, Australia, and designed well before the advent of COVID-19, explores a diverse range of people’s feelings, practices and understandings concerning home-based digital devices and the personal digital data generated with their use. Using a video ethnography ‘home tour’ and an elicitation technique involving hand-drawn maps of people’s homes, digital devices and the personal data generated with and through these devices, this approach was designed to elicit the sensory, affective and relational elements of people’s digital device and personal data use at home. The fieldwork had just commenced when stay-at-home and physical distancing orders were suddenly introduced. Our article builds on and extends a growing body of literature on conducting fieldwork in the difficult conditions of the extended COVID-19 crisis by detailing our experiences of very quickly converting an ethnographic study that was planned to be in-person to a remote approach. We describe the adaptations we made to the project using video-call software and discuss the limits and opportunities presented by this significant modification.

Research-Creations for Speculating About Digitized Automation: Bringing Creative Writing Prompts and Vital Materialism into the Sociology of Futures

“…However, from March 2020, due to COVID-related lockdown restrictions, physical distancing and stay-at-home orders, we were forced to improvise ways of conducting research online that had initially been planned to be face-to-face. The creative writing workshops we outline in this article are an example of this turn toward a novel combination of online with innovative methods due to the constraints imposed by the pandemic (see Watson & Lupton, 2022 for further discussion about how we transformed our methods during the pandemic).…”

“…She wanted to go beyond eliciting matter-of-fact recountings, or words that are responses to direct questions, such prompts or cues that require people to think imaginatively or consider their sensory responses can surface phenomena that are usually left unsaid in conventional social research methods (Rousell, 2020). While we have used creative writing or drawing activities in previous research (e.g., Lupton & Watson, 2020; Watson & Lupton, 2021, 2022), we had not previously used these new prompts. Part of our study design, therefore, was to test how well each prompt worked in generating the kinds of responses in which we were interested.…”

Peeking Behind the Curtains

“…We also acknowledge concepts that, while not directly related, echo sentiments found within patchwork ethnography. These include resilient research (Rahman et al 2021) and agile research (Watson and Lupton 2022), which demonstrate how researchers are successfully adapting and swiftly converting their research methods, particularly during COVID-19, in order to meet deadlines and uphold research consistency.…”

“…Lack of access, world changes due to COVID-19 and personal issues made the prospect of conducting ethnographic fieldwork in-person and long-term virtually impossible, as is increasingly becoming the experience of many anthropologists (Blum 2020;Fine and Abramson 2020;Góralska 2020;Johnson 2022;Podjed 2021;Serekoane et al 2021;Watson et al 2021;Watson and Lupton 2022). Through patchwork ethnography, we were able to take a peek behind the patchwork curtain, exploring death and the body in Adelaide.…”

Pandemic Isolation in Belarus through the Perspective of Photographs

“…Remote participatory methods, digital ethnography, instant messaging interviews, and video-call software became the primary methods and means of conducting research amidst the pandemic (Burkholder et al 2021;Hall et. al 2021;Polat 2022;Watson and Lupton 2022).…”