Enriching Qualitative Inquiry: Exploring Immersive Technologies in Place-Based Research

Three-sixty video-ethnography is a growing field of research, offering novel insights into the complex interactions between individuals and their environments. Despite its potential, the application of 360-degree video in qualitative research remains underexplored. The study presented here aims to bridge this gap, by discussing an approach to data collection and visual analysis, grounded in a multimodal epistemological framework for in-depth qualitative exploration of place-based interactions. Specifically, the paper investigates the integration of 360-degree videos and Virtual Reality Head-Mounted Displays (VR-HMD), for content production and visualization within qualitative research. This technological integration facilitates multimodal coding and enables a more nuanced attention to non-verbal cues in video-ethnography, allowing researchers to (re)experience and reflect on meaning-making practices and (dis)embodied narratives. Such an approach offers a fresh perspective into the interplay between people and their surroundings. Demonstration of the methodology’s effectiveness is substantiated through a case study from the project ‘REPLACE: Rebuilding a Sense of Place. The Socio-Cultural Role of 3D Technologies in Increasing Community Resilience after Natural Disasters’. This paper focuses on one project case-study: the seismic ‘events’ that affected the city of L’Aquila in the Apennine Mountain region of Italy in 2009. The 360° video-ethnography allowed us to capture experiences of the earthquake and its aftermath. The multimodal coding was essential for capturing how the post-earthquake period was experienced, as well as how the approaches to reconstruction influenced the social recovery and rebuilding of attachment within the affected community. Our findings indicate that non-verbal cues substantiated the narratives of the community members about the reconstruction of the city, including their perceptions of urban transformation and the Disneyfication and Disneyization processes affecting the historic center. This study contributes to the growing body of literature on immersive methodologies in qualitative research, highlighting the potential of immersive video methods for evidence-based research.