The Symbolism of video

: Exploring migrant mothers' experiences. Yolanda Hernandez-Albujar. (2007). in Gregory Stanczak (2007), Visual research methods: Image, society, and representation (pp, 281-306). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

The author discussed some ethical issues involved in visual ethnographic video approach in her study of the migratory experience among Latin American mothers in Italy. She argued that the conventional ethnographic videotaping was not feasible because it could disclose identities of the participants. Thus she reconfigured the video (the title is "Voices") by incorporating related images in an experimental way to convey emotions and situations that the participants described through in-depth interviews. She wrote the final video was a practical solution to the participants' refusal to be video-recorded, and writing, "I substituted the participants' faces and their gestures and actions in front of the camera by symbols that engages metaphors of the verbal and visual narratives" (p. 291)

Finally, she discussed some limitations of her work: Although the video should represent the finding, but screening the video itself potentially limit a generation of sociological knowledge. She admitted that the video should be presented alongside with the conventional text analysis of the project for the best understanding of the project. However, she pointed out, access to visual data in publication limits video methodology in the social sciences. Video is not streamlined in the publication unlike still images, she argued.

She quoted Ken Plummer (2001, Documents of life 2, An invitation to a critical humanism) in the delayed use of video for sociology:

"[I]ndeed a whole new generation of "video" experts seems to have emerged outside of sociology to do sociology's work! There are now several generations of "video workers" who have used video as radical means of transforming the orthodox visual image and of providing a whole library of "alternative video forms." (p. 71, cited p. 303)