Introduction: Illuminating everyday realities: The significance of video methods for social science and health research

This introduction prefaces the papers that comprise this special issue entitled 'Using Video in Social Science and Health Research' (ISBN 978-1-921348-24-2). This issue contributes to a recent burgeoning of interest in, and use of, video based methodologies in the health and social sciences. This collection of papers, received from Austria, Australia and the United Kingdom, shows video-recording to be a truly multidisciplinary resource that is adopted to assist research into diverse contexts and topics, involving collaborative engagements with research participants from all walks of life. Video methodologies are clearly creative, evolving, challenging and rewarding. With many people using video cameras to record important life events, lay access to video recording equipment is common. In turn, popular video recordings are frequently shared on websites where they are accessed not only by people known to the participants or recorder, but by unknown individuals in a myriad of geographic locations. People are increasingly accustomed to having their everyday lives recorded, often with the understanding that the footage may be viewed by numerous other people. To use video recordings in research is to harness this wider cultural aspect which in turn can reveal the complexities of everyday experiences and realities.