UBELONG co-founders and Expedition Leaders Cedric Hodgeman and Raul Roman led ten highly-qualified professionals through a rigorous research journey to understand the impact of international volunteers in the most popular volunteer destination in Latin America. Most of the footage from the field was taken by Raul Roman on a handheld video cam.

The team’s work was rooted in rigorous social science methods. The research design incorporated a variety of qualitative data collection tools, including structured and unstructured interviews and participant observation. With the support of Quimera, the team also used video ethnography to better understand stakeholder motivations, attitudes, perceptions and behaviors.

In addition to preparing UBELONG and the expedition team to use video in their research process Quimera worked with UBELONG to develop a “video report”, parallel in structure to the text-based report, documenting the research expedition as well as presenting key findings.

The video report, entitled “People to People” is divided into five chapters, this being the first.

Chapter 2 of UBELONG’s video report “People to People”.

Chapter 3 of UBELONG’s video report “People to People”.

Chapter 4 of UBELONG’s video report “People to People”.

Chapter 5 of UBELONG’s video report “People to People”.

NASTAD, the National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors, undertook a qualitative study focusing on HIV/AIDS among Latino gay men in the U.S. and Puerto Rico. Quimera worked with NASTAD to develop a video report, following the same structure as the text-based report, in which the three researchers use a roundtable format to discuss the project, the issues, and elaborate on key findings, challenges and constraints. The eight chapters of the video report can be found on NASTAD’s youtube channel.

Speaking to a camera, or speaking with an interviewer while being filmed, is not always a relaxing experience. This video report is a great example of how the roundtable format worked particularly well, where team members seemed comfortable with the camera, focused on each other, and discussed the material rather than any one individual worrying about being “in front of the camera”.

This video report was the first of its kind funded by the Office of AIDS Research at the National Institutes of Health, and one of the first funded across all NIH.

The text report can be found at NASTAD’s website.

Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Congresswoman Donna Christensen (D-V.I.) speak about the importance of increased awareness and education in honor of National Women and Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day (March 10). We developed the video for one of our clients, NASTAD, the National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors. This marks the first in a webcast series for NASTAD looking at issues surrounding women and HIV/AIDS in this country.

CHF International, with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has been working with local partners in India to help promote improved working conditions and livelihoods for this marginalized group of people. By supporting local waste collectors CHF is helping create jobs, alleviate poverty, change the way the general public sees this group of workers and change the way waste collectors see themselves.

Quimera helped CHF plan the interviewing and production phase of the video project; filming was done with a local firm in India. Quimera then worked with CHF to edit over three hours of footage into this short overview piece.

Professor Raul Roman invited me to his class at SAIS (School for Advanced International Studies), Johns Hopkins University, to present and discuss our work with video in research and evaluation.

The in-class assignment consisted of a case-study about Build Change, an NGO that focuses on earthquake resistant construction, about to launch in Haiti. Students needed to develop a research and evaluation plan that integrated video.

Professor and Students… quite impressive. And we had a lot of fun.

This is a section from an M&E pilot we did with Red Cross Tsunami Recovery Program in southern Thailand. One of the purposes of the pilot was to deploy, explore and refine methods for integrating video and participatory-video into a monitoring and evaluation process, including beneficiaries as partners in the process.

Red Cross and I were selected to present the piece at the 2010 Chicago Ethnography Conference, Ethnography Going Public.

I was later invited by American Red Cross International Services onto one of their panels at the 2011 World Conference on Humanitarian Studies, Innovations Track, focusing on evidence-based program design. Someone at the Conference later blogged about the presentation and the potential for participatory video in disaster risk reduction.