The Use of Video in Social Research: Young People and Emotional Distress.

This work paper describes the experience of a group of young university student of Barcelona making a documentary about the young people’s emotional distress. The documentary is the result of a didactic project carried out at the University of Barcelona. The film follows the story of Maria, an Italian student during her Erasmus project in Barcelona, through the positive and negative aspects of the experience of the trip. At the same time, the story of the protagonist is inserted into a broader context of youth emotional. Then, this paper explains all the phases of the didactic project from the first meetings with the students to the presentation of the documentary in classroom.

In this paper we also provide an overview of the use of video methodology in education practice and social research. The work describes the use of video for data collection, the features and potentials of video as a research tool. The students, guided by the professor-filmmaker, use the video and change their way of observing and seeing the social reality. They verify in their environment the reason and the existence of emotional distress. Thus, the students become researchers and the camera becomes an actor in the research process. So the video and visual methodology offer different ways of practicing field research.