Shooting a diary, not just a hoop: using video diaries to explore the embodied everyday contexts of a university basketball team

Abstract

Readers should also refer to the journal's website at http://www.informaworld.com/rqrs and check volume 2, issue 2 to view the accompanying video clips. This will appear as ‘Supplementary Content’ to this article.

This paper examines video diaries as creative, visual methods and considers their value as a complementary and innovative method in qualitative, social science based, research on sport. Data are presented from a university basketball team and live links to video diaries are incorporated to contextualise and illustrate three key themes of the everyday, identity and the body. Evidence suggests that the players embody varying levels of ‘visual capital’ that inform their understanding and ‘production’ of these visual, ethnographic representations. Video diaries are assessed as a potential response to a crisis of representation facing researchers, demonstrating how this form of narrative data, in the context of visual methodology, is an interesting development for qualitative research in sport.

Keywords:

• video diaries
• visual methodology
• embodied identities
• the everyday
• basketball

Notes

1. Please refer to the journal’s website at http://www.informaworld.com/rqrs to view clips of these video diaries.

2. This player’s name was removed for reasons of confidentiality.

3. The National Basketball Association in America. The biggest and most popular league in the world.

4. One of the diarists declined a request to interview him, and the other had left the country.

5. Which were part of a wider ethnography.