Recording Consumer Practices : A Practical Application in Helsingborg

Practice theory roughly argues that the material world and the cultural world continuously interact and co-constitute one another. However, existing research methods on consumer behaviors tend to separatethese two dimensions and show a preference toward concentrating on only one of them. Video ethnography as a medium has the potential to capture these two worlds—to combine the symbolic and material, the practical and the discursive, the doings and the sayings. In particular, recording a shopping tour of a consumer as a “walk and talk” session has the ability to capture complex data: the material environment, the context, goods, bodily expressions and words. Two challenges with this method, ethical concernsand technical concerns with camera will be discussed