What We Talk About When We Talk About Video
Anna Kushnir, a researcher at Harvard investigating STIs who I met at Science Blogging 2008, writes for the JoVE blog–that’s the Journal of Visualized Experiments, a much buzzed about site where you can watch scientists at work. She asked us how we use video now, and how we could use video in the future, to advance our project. So I emailed around these queries to INFO staffers, and got some interesting responses. This is what we talk about when we talk about video.
Also on the video tip…
On Tuesday, Heather Sanders and I journeyed to the UN Foundation at 1800 Massachussets Ave (a certified Green Building) to shoot an interview with Purnima Mane, the deputy executive director of UNFPA. We’ll post her interview up here shortly–she gives an amazing pitch for reinvesting in family planning–but the visit also gave us a great opportunity to see what the UN Foundation is doing with video these days. Not only do the have a podcast room (where we taped) but they are feeding at least one YouTube channel and building myriad other dynamic projects like Nothing But Nets, a malaria relief campaign that’s tapped NBA players and Sports Illustrated writers to fight a disease that infects more than 500 million people each year.
On Day One is a Better World Campaign project the foundation is getting behind. The campaign is about asking people what the new president should do on January 19, 2009. You can vote on people’s ideas and discuss them on the site.
INFO’s own Heather Sanders weighed in on camera–look for her interview on the site shortly!
Thanks, Anna, for getting us thinking about ways video makes a difference.
How do you use videos in your projects? How should we?
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Anna said,
February 21, 2008 @ 11:54 am
Thank you so much for the interview and the thought provoking ideas. As you mentioned, video has the potential to reach many different kinds of people, with fewer barriers than printed material. I hope that it finds wider use not only in your organization, but many others.
Ward said,
February 25, 2008 @ 12:09 pm
At the INFO Project and the Center for Communication Programs we also have used video for evaluation research. In particular, Dr. Young-Mi Kim and her colleagues have taped family planning counseling sessions to evaluate the Decision-Making Tool for Family Planning Clients and Providers. The Decision-Making Tool is a communication aid, in the form of a flipchart, that help a family planning client, with the help of a counselor, to reach decisions about contraceptive methods and to learn how to use them.
In Mexico and Nicaragua Dr. Kim and colleagues taped family planning providers working with different clients. They compared counseling sessions before and after training and practice with the Tool. They used a rigorous methodology to track the discussion and evaluate how the client and provider interact as well as what each of them says.
To summarize, the studies found that the tool did improve the quality of counseling. You can find reports on this research—both how it was conducted and its findings–in the Guttmacher Institute’s journal International Family Planning Perspectives at http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3116205.html and also in the journal Patient Education and Counseling at http://tinyurl.com/yukku2.
The INFO Project and the World Health Organization’s Department of Reproductive Health and Research developed the Decision-Making Tool. It has been adapted and translated in many countries. You can see the tool on the WHO Web site at http://www.who.int/reproductive-health/publications/dmt/index.htm.