In most conventional research it is comparatively easy to reassure participants that they will remain anonymous and that the data they allow us to collect will remain confidential.³⁹ With video-records, neither can be guaranteed. Instead of anonymous cases with names changed and identities disguised, we have anonymous case studies with no names changed and identities plainly evident. This problem, which no researcher or lawyer can solve, is completely untractable without the active involvement of the people who will appear on the tape. They need to be involved at the time of taping and for all subsequent use occasions, be that analytic work, editing for particular purposes, or presentations and showings to particular audiences, especially in the participant's own work environment or professional community. Because of these complications, it is incumbent upon the researcher to be much more careful in the use made of video records than is customary for other data.

Institutional Review Boards at universities and their equivalents at corporate research laboratories have adopted a variety of guidelines and procedures designed to protect participants from harm. Yet all videographers know that these regulations are not sufficient. Rather, researchers, educators, designers, managers, and the people being videotaped must actively work together to come to a shared understanding of what kinds of problems are likely to arise in their particular situations and how these can best be solved. While issues of confidentiality, privacy, and legal as well as ethical accountability have been discussed extensively for medical and therapeutic research, the education and design communities are only beginning to think about these issues as they increasingly adopt video-based methodologies.

We believe that what constitutes appropriate ethical practice for our work is currently being worked out within an emerging community of practice that is in the process of constituting itself. Here we aim, therefore, not to lay down hard-and-fast ethical principles, but rather attempt to discuss some of the concerns that have come up for us and our colleagues as we introduce video technology into our various research enterprises.

In our efforts to come to grips with ethical questions in video work, we have found it useful to consider four related problem areas. These revolve around making the tape, analyzing it, presenting the results of the analysis, and non-research uses of the taped materials. For each of these problem areas, questions arise as to who is to make decisions and whose benefit is to be considered. Is it the people (with) whom we study? Or should our decisions be driven by concern for getting the right kinds of data? Should those who pay for our research have a say?

Anthropologists have traditionally adhered to the principle that our first responsibility is to those we study (Blomberg, Giacomi, Mosher, & Swenton-Wall, 1993; Cassell & Jacobs, 1971; Gilbert, Tashima, & Fishman, 1991). The unavoidable disclosure of people's identities on videotape makes this responsibility even more weighty. In turn, it puts an additional burden on informed consent procedures, and indeed makes that very notion problematic.

It is important to realize that agreements are generally given not so much because the participant has read the consent form and has evaluated the proposed activity, but because of some prior established relationship. This may be with the researcher, who has explained the project in a confidence-inspiring way, or, not infrequently, it goes through some person of authority, is endorsed by somebody with higher status, such as a teacher, a physician, or a supervisor. Such consents are often questionable on their face. What can an employee do when his supervisor says, "Listen, we've got these nice people from the research institute here today, and they wanna make a few tapes and talk to you a little. Show them a good time!" and walks out. Even if the researcher explains that people are free to refuse, exercising such freedom may not be an option for the worker. This is a dilemma that is difficult to assess and for which there are no general guidelines much less recipes. Rather, we are dealing here with situations that require careful thinking up front, trying to understand who in the situation is potentially vulnerable, and then, to the best of our abilities, making sure that no harm comes to these persons.

In workplace studies, there are grave concerns regarding the potential evaluative use of videotapes by management. Even if the purpose of the research is to look at work process, any presentation about what is going on would ideally involve showing a piece of tape, and this tape will always have particular people involved in particular kinds of (possibly objectionable) practices. It is then easy to turn around and see the tape as an indictment of the worker and not of the entire ecology of work, even if that is what the researchers intended.

It goes without saying that except in completely public situations (like in the street, an airport, a public park) participants must be asked for permission to record. Participants need to have a fair amount of control over the process of videotaping, including the right to stop the taping at any time. Once taping is completed, they should have the right to review the tapes and have them erased if they so choose, either on the spot or within a reasonable period of time.⁴⁰ Getting people to consent to videotaping usually gets the lion share of attention in ethics discussions. This is when "subjects" first face the possibility of being on camera and constitutes their first and most potent opportunity to refuse. Yet it is often surprisingly easy to get people to agree to be videotaped.

For most people, video recording is still, at least potentially, a substantial invasion of privacy. However, it may well be the case that the use of recording devices is not regarded as particularly intrusive in situations where the participants are already highly "wired" into the ambient technology (for example flying a helicopter with flight suit, microphone, ear phones, etc.; or giving birth hooked up to a uterine pressure gauge, a fetal heart rate monitor, an intravenous drip, a blood pressure cuff, etc.). In these situations a video recorder is probably only a small additional burden. In some research laboratories video recording is so routine that people have become quite used to it and no longer feel their privacy substantially invaded. Yet, such exceptions not withstanding, it must be recognized that in most settings and on most occasions a video camera is not a routine presence.

In educational settings, the most common procedure is to have parents sign a consent form in which they agree that their child will be videotaped "for research purposes." They typically sign away all rights regarding later uses of the tapes for analysis, public broadcasting, advertising or whatever. But teachers, too, are videotaped in the classroom and it is by no means clear whether they understand the implications of allowing themselves to be taped. Increasingly, aspects of a teacher's activities in the classroom are captured that were never before open to scrutiny. This may work positively as well a negatively for the teacher. To protect participants, he or she has to have ultimate decision power regarding videotapes, including the possibility of destroying them. Such a stance, of course, raises questions about legitimate interests of the researcher and those who have funded the research.

What emerges here very clearly is that consent is not a singular act that happens at one point in time, but rather a process through which the status of actual or potential tapes is negotiated and sometimes renegotiated. It may be that permission to use should be revocable if the participant's situation changes because it is possible that what was innocuous at one point may become potentially damaging at another. For example, Jordan once received a request to review (and possibly erase) a videotape from a person who was more or less a bystander at the time of videotaping but who became concerned about evidence for a medical malpractice suit later on.

Interaction Analysis depends on collaborative, multi-disciplinary group work. This alone entails that more than one person sees the tapes. Typically, we work on tapes in work groups with varying constituents and use our tapes for more than one type of analysis. It is usually not possible to specify ahead of time in what manner or for what purposes tapes will be analyzed. For example, Jordan told women in labor that she would analyze their tapes for the influence of uterine contractions on interaction patterns, an interest she had at the time she made the tapes. But since then many of these tapes have been analyzed from many different points of view, such as the role of the husband, interaction with technology, correspondence of the tape recording with women's later accounts of the birth, and many others, none of which could have been specified ahead of time. In a real sense the women were giving unrestricted consent to the use of the tapes for not well-specified purposes.

A particular set of issues arises during video review sessions with participants. At that time, we use the tape to elicit further information about what is happening on the tape from the point of view of the actor. (It also happens on occasion that participants are present at regular Interaction Analysis sessions.) We have found that such presence need be handled with great caution. Participants often come to see things about themselves or a close friend or associate that they were not aware of, that they are embarrassed about, or find frightening. This is not an easy encounter with self. It may be painful to watch oneself engage in behavior patterns that one would object to in others. Cutting people off, invading others' space, not paying attention to someone bidding for participation, saying something "stupid", all these are done by everybody much of the time but we mercifully do eye-avoidance or ignore them in other ways. They organize our lives, but part of their power is that they are normally hidden, invisible, fleeting phenomena. The video makes them freezable, analyzable, displayable -- holding them up for public viewing. One way to think about invasion of privacy is as the presence of the camera and the camera person. Another much more perfidious invasion of privacy comes from the microscopic look at expressions, interactions, and behaviors that are normally out of awareness, that nobody ever has to face unless they have been recorded. Thus, such sessions need to be approached with a great deal of caution, of preparation, and of willingness to work further with participants, to let them come to some sort of resolution and integration about what they saw themselves doing.

Practically, it is important to know if participants coming to analysis sessions have ever seen themselves on a tape before. A person who sees themselves on video for the first time needs some considerable amount of time to adjust to that image of themselves before they can be counted on to participate in the analytic work. It might be advisable not to let that first encounter happen in a public situation where the participant must deal with the real and imagined reactions of others as well.

A general problem when tapes are shown to a public is that researchers and participants may have different ideas about what permission to videotape entails. For example, parents who have signed a consent form allowing the researcher to make tapes for a study of children at play may become upset if they find their toddler starring as the bully of the nursery school in a scholarly symposium on aggressive behavior in preschoolers. Similarly, a researcher or designer may be dismayed at finding herself or himself on public display in front of colleagues who know them well, even though they had agreed to be videotaped "for research purposes."

The critical issue here is that we often would like to show the tape, often in fact need to show the tape to make our analysis credible. If this is the case, we should always thinks seriously about the relationship between the audience and the participants. For public presentations it sometimes works to show a series of 35-mm slides taken from the tape, possibly with faces blanked out, and a reading of the transcript. Heath (1986) had drawings made from still photographs off videotapes (Appendix G), not only because he felt the analytic points can be illustrated more clearly that way but also for ethical reasons.

Finally, videotapes are powerful records. They can be used for many things in addition to the research for which they were created. For example, videotapes of classrooms can be used to evaluate teachers. Clips from workplace studies are powerful persuaders in arguments to management. Videotapes of people operating machines, made for improving the design of those machine, are a compelling source of material for advertising. These kinds of uses inevitably have much greater potential than research use for harming the participants.

We have only begun to explore the ethical issues around working with video. They are clearly complex and, furthermore, highly variable between projects. As we look for ways of dealing with them we might find guidance in the Hippocratic injunction: "At least do no harm; and if possible, do some good."