Smile...you're on research camera

I've run into an interesting element of putting my research into practice lately. Part of the oral history project I'm running called for videotaping my interviewees. I had a number of interviews set up in the San Francisco Bay area, and I've been lugging the video equipment around everywhere I go. It hasn't come out of the carrying case yet.

I expected that some people would be a bit squeamish about being videotaped. Most people are afraid of how they look and sound. Still, they get over it, and I've done video-based research in the past. Quite a bit, actually, before I came to graduate school. I've got a lot of techniques for cajoling participants into letting me turn on the camera, after which they promptly forget that they are being taped at all.

This time, though, every technique I have up my sleeve failed. Why? It wasn't about the self-consciousness this time.

The subject about which I am interviewing is fairly new on the academic and research scene, and is in a state of rapid change and development. The people whom I have set out to interview are largely responsible for its advancement either in industry or academia. The main objection to the taping is that these people are sensitive to go on record and make a commitment or solid statement. They're fine with non-attributable statements, but as soon as their name is to go on it, they back away (even though they are ostensibly leading the movement in different capacities and to varying extents.) Frankly, I don't think I could have predicted or foreseen this, but it's an interesting revelation nonetheless.

I'm going to have to think about how to give people like this incentive to provide video interviews and feel comfortable that their statements aren't going to come back to bite them later.