Identifying stakeholder priorities in use of wearable cameras for researching parent-child interactions

Abstract

Wearable Cameras (WCs) enable researchers to capture objective descriptions of what participants see and experience as they go about their normal lives. When studying interactions between individuals (e.g. between a parent and child), using multiple WCs can provide highly detailed descriptions of interactions with levels of ecological validity not possible with other methods. However, the use of WCs brings challenges too, and understanding these is key to developing and optimising these methods. We captured the challenges experienced by a variety of stakeholders, namely parents and a range of different researcher roles (academics, field-workers and data processors) involved in a large UK study exploring parent-child interactions using low-cost, off-the-shelf WCs. High among the challenges identified were difficulties caused when subjects are temporarily not in view in the video footage captured. This and other factors identified were used as criteria to select a new, improved WC. The new WCs reduced the time faces were not in view by 75%. We report this and the other challenges identified, and suggest how these can be used to guide and help optimise future studies of this kind.