Walking Methodologies

Description of the method

Visual methods in walking methodologies for participatory research help to explain how place is conceptualized, theorized and materialized, regardless of the discipline of application, whether it is health, education, sociology, urban environment, or other. Among these diverse methods, walking interviews, walkabouts, outings on foot as an ethnographic methodology, as well as nature walks/trails and hikes are predominant in the literature.

Walking interview

The walking interview as an innovative methodology

Walking conversations is an innovative methodology where the researcher speaks with participants as they walk outside or inside a building such as a hospital. Rather than being circumscribed and resistant to change, space becomes a dynamic concept, intertwined with links to other worlds, including social, economic and environmental ones.

Space becomes a porous and emerging entity, especially when the conversation takes place on a busy street or during a bike ride on a mountain. The surrounding environment provides a multi-sensory stimulus for both the interviewee and the interviewer. 

A walking interview balances power dynamics

Interviewing while walking also helps to balance the power dynamics between the main research stakeholders, particularly between researchers and participants.

Moreover, the most important thing in the case of walking interviews is to specify whether the itinerary is determined by the interviewer or the interviewee. This makes it possible to establish the route in advance, and thus to focus the interview on specific relevant locations to meet the research objectives. Nevertheless, it is useful to follow the usual path rooted in the participant’s existential concerns to better understand their lived experiences and the integral meaning of their interpretation of the facts.

Pedestrianism

Pedestrianism as a method of scientific research rooted in ethnographic realism. It consists of walking with a person for a few hours as a way of questioning everyday practices and places, while the person talks about their experience. This method opens up opportunities to better understand daily activity and make connections between walking, time, and space.

Pedestrianism identifies how pedestrians view their surrounding environments in relation to their values and attitudes. This makes it possible to examine how the participant identifies with a particular place, and in so doing, creates stories of place and navigates in their changing environment. In addition, pedestrianism incorporates rhythm, walking speed in relation to the regular flow of the street, and urban sounds to distinguish urban patterns and analyze different relationships between places.

Pedestrianism is a research method where the researcher follows the participant to explore their experience and sensitivity in all its complexity and magnificence using different media, including photography and qualitative geographic information systems. This makes it possible to explore the meaning, perception, and significance of the importance of walking for different groups and individuals with respect to a given place.

Pedestrianism thus makes it possible to embrace an evidence-based approach to document evidence-based public health interventions.

For example:

Miaux et al. used pedestrianism to promote better communication between residents, urban planners, and transportation authorities in three boroughs in Montreal, including Plateau Mont-Royal, Ville-Marie, and Anjou. It improved ways of thinking about how to make the urban environment more walkable.

Irvin for his part used this method to explore the journey of a person diagnosed with HIV infection in New York City. Pedestrianism thus can be used in a variety of fields.

The walking tour

The walking tour is an excellent research method for discovering community and individual connections by focusing on place as an intervention site from a retrospective viewpoint to explain the dominant ideas and discourses in the historical narratives and geospatial configurations of an area. A walking tour thus makes it possible to apprehend and reflect what life in a given region looks like by exploring the sense of belonging. It involves walking as a means of generating knowledge in synergy with other note-taking tools such as photo and video recording to capture the experience of movement in a sensory and social environment.

Nature/trail walking and hiking

Nature/trail walking and hiking are conceptualized as a practice to take care of oneself and the environment. Hiking and nature walks become tools for place to fulfill a therapeutic and restorative role, contributing to the well-being of the person and of the community by extension. However, some authors maintain a distinction between culture and nature in their research, which emphasizes the views, beliefs and values of colonizers – white settlers. It is incumbent on researchers using this method to avoid perpetuating the universalism of Western colonialists, instead establishing links between improving the health of the population and the decolonization of their bodies through the knowledge of, for example, First Nations peoples.

It has been observed that the only way to better understand nature is immersion through walking. However, we should begin to understand who is authorized and able to go or enter these spaces in order to better understand the nature and extent of the movements of certain groups the outdoors, including people with disabilities, the LGBT community, minorities and the female gender. For this reason, this type of research should include, in addition to ethnography, queer housing theory and feminist and phenomenological theories.