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

Wearable Cameras (WC) 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 issues experienced by a variety of stakeholders (parents, field-workers, data processors, and researchers) involved in a large UK study exploring parent-child interactions using low-cost, off-the-shelf WCs. High among the issues identified were difficulties caused when subjects are temporarily not in frame in the video footage captured. This and other issues were used as criteria to select a new improved WC. The new WC reduced the time faces were not in frame by 75%. We report this and the other issues identified, and suggest how the issues identified can be used to guide and optimise future studies of this kind.