Methodology

Whyte, W. F. (1991). Participatory Action Research. London: SAGE Publications

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"Editing clips from various Superhero genre films and assembling them together in short videos themed by specific emotions. Each clip will be re-edited – heightening specific colours, taking out the sound, focusing on certain scenes where the director clearly wanted to transmit an exact emotion. Each video will be showed to different focus groups throughout the process, each group being asked about the emotion transmitted, the use of colour, the editing, the choice of scenes – in this way, the effectiveness of the video arrangements will be more clearly determined and, in return, the products can be altered until they reach the right composition. By doing this, I am using a technique called participatory action research. As William Foote Whyte argues in the book, “science is not achieved by distancing oneself from the world; as generations of scientists know, the greatest conceptual and methodological challenges come from engagement with the world.” (Whyte, 1991, p.21). Taking that into consideration, I decided to use this methodology because it allows the project to evolve and change its shape without being stuck in a conventional mode that focuses mainly on academic or scientific research. As a project focusing on human emotions, more liberty in the research aspect is required. Whyte notes, “In PAR, some of the members of the organization we study are actively engaged in the quest for information and ideas to guide their future actions.” (Whyte, 1991, p. 20­). As such, what better way to gather information about human emotions than asking other humans?"