Subjective Evidence Based Ethnography: Method and Applications

Abstract

Subjective Evidence Based Ethnography (SEBE) is a method designed to access subjective experience. It uses First Person Perspective (FPP) digital recordings as a basis for analytic Replay Interviews (RIW) with the participants. This triggers their memory and enables a detailed step by step understanding of activity: goals, subgoals, determinants of actions, decision-making processes, etc. This paper describes the technique and two applications. First, the analysis of professional practices for know-how transferring purposes in industry is illustrated with the analysis of nuclear power-plant operators' gestures. This shows how SEBE enables modelling activity, describing good and bad practices, risky situations, and expert tacit knowledge. Second, the analysis of full days lived by Polish mothers taking care of their children is described, with a specific focus on how they manage their eating and drinking. This research has been done on a sub-sample of a large scale intervention designed to increase plain water drinking vs sweet beverages. It illustrates the interest of SEBE as an exploratory technique in complement to other more classic approaches such as questionnaires and behavioural diaries. It provides the detailed "how" of the effects that are measured at aggregate level by other techniques.Acknowledgments: This paper benefited from the smart and constructive comments of three anonymous reviewers. It also benefited from a residency for Lahlou at Paris Institute for Advanced Study (France) as a EURIAS senior fellow, with support of the European Union

Experiential Learning and Simulation-Based Training in Norwegian Police Education: Examining Body-Worn Video as a Tool to Encourage Reflection

“…Social scientists have illustrated how BWV and other life-logging devices may be used in social research to offer new insights into human behaviour, social interaction and knowledge transmission (Doherty, Hodges, King et al, 2013;Kelly, Marshall, Badland et al, 2013;Lahlou, 2011;Lahlou et al, 2015;Mann, Nolan, Wellman, 2003;Rieken, Garcia-Sanchez, Trujillo, & Bear, 2015). For example, first-person video footage taken with BWV has been shown to facilitate the remembering of mental processes at the time of action (Lahlou, 2011) and improve participants' understanding of their own activity (Lahlou et al, 2015). Even more importantly for the present investigation, they may also be used to enhance professional education and development (e.g.…”

“…Concretely, we applied Subjective Evidence-Based Ethnography (SEBE, Lahlou, 2011;Lahlou, et al, 2015) both to encourage reflective practice amongst Norwegian police students 3 and as a research method to study risky decision-making and improve operative training 4 . SEBE first involves the use of body-worn video (see above) to capture participants' first-person perspective during an activity.…”

“…Psychological and behavioural research and development based on first-person video capture and reflection on recording (e.g. Lahlou, 2011;Lahlou, Le Bellu, & Boesen-Mariani, 2015;Le Bellu, Lahlou, Nosulenko, & Samoylenko, 2016) suggest that Body-Worn Video devices (BWV) may offer significant, but currently unexploited opportunities to enhance professional police development. We present empirical research examining whether BWV may be used to enhance experiential learning and encourage reflection in the context of simulation-based training for Norwegian police students.…”

The Researcher as Experimental Subject: Using Self-Experimentation to Access Experiences, Understand Social Phenomena, and Stimulate Reflexivity

“…Indeed, recent research provides many illustrations of how new technologies and digital methodologies enable forms of firstperson perspective research (e.g., Lahlou, Le Bellu & Boesen-Mariani, 2015) that were unavailable (and perhaps unimaginable) to experimenters of prior generations, yet among whom many of the issues regarding the legitimacy of first-person self-observation methods were supposedly settled. Further impetus for exploring new formats of self-experimentation in social psychology is provided by recent debate concerning the status of phenomenology (and its primary method, introspection) in relation to psychology (see Dennett, 2007;Marbach, 2007), the details of which we will touch upon briefly.…”

Risk Assessment for Subjective Evidence-Based Ethnography Applied in High Risk Environment

“…The point of view of the camera is then that of the subject: this characterizes the first person or subjective point of view. This kind of approach was conceptualized by Lahlou [3,4] under the name of Subjective Evidence-Based Ethnography (SEBE). The SEBE is thus a family of methods developed for investigation in social science based on subjective audio-video recordings with a miniature video-camera most of the time worn at eye-level (the subcam), then confrontation of subjects with these subjective recordings to collect their subjective experience, and finally discussion of findings and final interpretations between researchers and subjects.…”