YouTube as a Qualitative Research Asset: Reviewing User Generated Videos as Learning Resources.

YouTube, the video hosting service, offers students, teachers, and practitioners of qualitative researchers a unique reservoir of video clips introducing basic qualitative research concepts, sharing qualitative data from interviews and field observations, and presenting completed research studies. This web-based site also affords qualitative researchers the potential avenue to share their reusable learning resources for all interested parties to use. Key Words: YouTube, User Generated Content, Web 2.0, Qualitative Research, and Learning Objects The other day Maureen Duffy, one of my co-editors with The Qualitative Report, and I were talking about incorporating video in the online qualitative research courses we were teaching. We discussed the pro’s and con’s of creating our own clips when Maureen noted there were some interesting qualitative research videos on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com) we might be able to use. Knowing how well Maureen knows YouTube and its plentiful resources I decided to check out what the online video sharing site had to offer qualitative researchers. For those readers who are not familiar with this online phenomenon, YouTube is a video hosting service that features user generated content or in other words, it is a site where registered users (i.e., anyone who creates an account with YouTube) can upload files containing video and unregistered users (i.e., anyone with a connection to the Internet) can view the videos. From most figures I have seen YouTube hosts millions of videos and users: “In January [2008], nearly 79 million viewers, or a third of all online viewers in the U.S., watched more than three billion user-posted videos on YouTube, according to comScore’s latest report” (Yen, 2008, ¶9). With this huge reservoir of digital resources I was hopeful to find some interesting and useful qualitative research videos. Having scoured YouTube the last few days I did find some useful videos teachers and students of qualitative research could use to further their basic understanding of these methodologies and associated procedures as well as some intriguing examples of research findings presented in video form. In the following mini-reviews I discuss a number of clips worth viewing. I have organized this presentation in four general categories of videos: Introductory Overviews and How To’s, Data Generation and Collection, and Study Results.