I just undertook a big big thing: a literature review of all the articles on participatory video for health.  This will be most interesting to academic researchers, particularly those that practice community-based and action-oriented approaches to research. I will tell you about how I selected and excluded articles and what I found out about participatory video. In future posts, I will also talk about my findings on photovoice, a participatory approach to research and photography.  As you will see, I did a lot of looking and at the end of the day, only came up with 3 scholarly articles on this topic.  So, good news for new research ideas and bad news for people needing research now!

The Review Methods That I Used

The review began with a broad search for peer-reviewed and public health oriented literature that discusses participatory production of photography or video as an approach to community-based participatory research (CBPR) projects. I used the following keywords and phrases in my search: participatory video, participatory film, photovoice, photo novella, participatory research AND photography OR photo, and participatory research AND video OR film. My initial search included the following databases: Proquest, PubMed/Medline, ISI Web of Science, and CSA Illumina’s PsycINFO. All searches were limited to English-language literature that was published before January 2008. This preliminary search resulted in 135 individual publications appearing in 86 journals, newspapers, magazines, and books.
Limiting the results to peer-reviewed journals eliminated 52 publications, approximately half of which (24) were masters’ theses or doctoral dissertations. Upon further inspection of these articles, I found that the preponderance of this work was relevant to my topic of research. However, given my choice to include only peer-reviewed articles, it was necessary to exclude them from this review. The elimination of so many articles is perhaps a hint, also confirmed by Google searches, that these practices are more common than the peer-reviewed literature portends.

Next, I limited my results to only articles that dealt with participatory production of photographs and video. This eliminated 24 articles, all of which dealt with the consumption, but not production, of video or photo in participatory research efforts. Finally, because of my focus on public health literature, I eliminated any article that was not either published within a journal or article that included health as a key issue or word. This final refinement resulted in the exclusion of 7 articles. There are a total of 51 articles that qualified to be included in my literature review, 3 of which dealt with participatory video and 48 of which dealt with participatory photography.

What I found out

The three peer-reviewed articles identified through my search use participatory production of video in a very different manner. The first article by Chavez et al is based on a specific participatory video methodology, however the following articles by Freudenthal et al and Chandra and Batada do not allude to a specific video methodology or practice. They simply incorporate the tool as they saw fit.

In “A Bridge Between Communities: Video-Making Using Principles of Community-Based Participatory Research”, authors Chavez, Israel, and colleagues from the University of Michigan, and the Detroit Community-Academic Urban Research Center partnered in the production of a participatory video (Chavez et al., 2004). As Chavez et al describe it, “The video examines the complexity of the concept of community, reviews the principles of CBPR, and documents the emergence of a partnership whose members work together to solve problems and develop solutions to health issues in their communities.” In this way, the video is a meta product: a participatory video about participatory research. The authors used the principles of CBPR in the video production process, following these six steps:

1. Engage the stakeholders
2. Solicit funding and informed consent
3. Create shared ownership
4. Build cross-cultural collaborations
5. Write the script together
6. Pull it all together – identify key themes, edit, and select music, quote, and still photographs.

Chavez et al found that the fusion of CBPR with video technology was an asset for inquiry as well as an exciting tool for publishing and disseminating findings.
Although this article is based on a single case study, and additional case studies could add validity to their how-to recommendations, it is the first to present a sophisticated exploration of the intersections in the practices of CBPR and participatory video production. In it, they present some of the opportunities and limitations in the use of video within CBPR projects. The authors propose that participatory video is a creative asset for inquiry in research and evaluation, a tool to publish results and disseminate findings to audiences not consistently acknowledged by research publications and/or the mass media. Chavez et al also warn that there are serious limitations, which also deserve further exploration, including: the invasion of participant privacy, the challenge of building participant trust and comfort with the video camera, the intensive time and cost requirements of video projects, confronting the ethics of omission and submission in the editing process, and overcoming the effects of the existing digital divide.

In their study of an effective school-based schistosomiasis prevention program in Tanzania, Freudenthal et al used an action research approach (2000). Through collaboration with educators, parents, and community members, the team created a set of educational interventions to reduce the transmission of schistosomiasis. One of the educational tools was video-recorded dramas, performed by 6th and 7th graders, and played for other community teens throughout the intervention. Freudenthal et al explain:

“Drama techniques, including role-plays, storytelling, dance, poetry and song are part of a performance tradition that has existed in African for a long time… Video-recording the dramas added another dimension as it provided an opportunity to the actors to see themselves perform and, equally important, it gave the actors and other audiences an opportunity to reflect and discuss issues related to schistosomiasis.” (pp 82).

In conclusion, the research team found that the educational attributes of the video contributed to an overall reduction in schistosomiasis rates. The authors argue that the participatory production of the film was a key factor in this impact, stating “To see members of ones own community addressing the problem of schistosomiasis has most likely a larger impact than to see complete strangers from another part of the world performing on video (Freudenthal, 2000).”

Chandra and Batada’s article explores stress and coping among 26 African American adolescents in Baltimore (2006). The group used a youth-driven and mixed-method approach to research and engaged in research translation and action through the youth-led production of a video for health promotion among teens. They explain, “The youth created the entire video—from script writing to film editing—and led discussions with groups of local community members, parents, and health advocates.” (pp 8). The article does not evaluate the video production process or impacts, but includes a web resource for researchers interested in engaging youth in participatory approaches to translation of their study findings.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 10:43 pm and is filed under Book/Article Review, CBPR Tips.