Watson Ash, Lupton Deborah
ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, Centre for Social Research in Health, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, and Vitalities Lab, Centre for Social Research in Health and Social Policy Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Int J Qual Methods. 2022 Mar 13;21:16094069221078376. doi: 10.1177/16094069221078376. eCollection 2022.
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.
在新冠疫情危机期间，对身体活动和面对面接触的限制，使许多定性研究人员在开展和完成需要面对面实地调查的项目时面临挑战。探索在这种情况下进行我们所称的“敏捷研究”，可以为研究社会世界提供新颖的方法论见解。在本文中，我们讨论了为应对国家封锁措施以遏制新型冠状病毒传播，我们对人种志实地调查所做的改变。“与个人数据共存”项目位于澳大利亚悉尼，在新冠疫情出现之前就已精心设计，该项目探讨了人们对家用数字设备以及使用这些设备所产生的个人数字数据的各种感受、做法和理解。通过视频人种志“家庭参观”以及一种涉及手绘家庭地图、数字设备以及通过这些设备产生和与之相关的个人数据的启发技术，这种方法旨在引出人们在家中使用数字设备和个人数据时的感官、情感和关系要素。当居家和保持社交距离的命令突然出台时，实地调查刚刚开始。我们的文章以在新冠疫情长期危机的艰难条件下进行实地调查的越来越多的文献为基础并加以扩展，详细介绍了我们将原本计划进行面对面调查的人种志研究迅速转变为远程研究的经历。我们描述了使用视频通话软件对项目所做的调整，并讨论了这一重大改变带来的局限性和机遇。
