Video: Mixed Methods - Exploring the Role of Emotions in Urban Behavior

Panos Mavros is interested in the intersection of human beings and urban spaces. A PhD researcher at University College, London’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, he originally studied architecture, which is another way of exploring of the nexus of people and the built environment. But as he continued his studies, what part of the nexus he was most focused on changed.“[A]s an architect,” he explains in a video segment accessible below, “you learn to design spaces of all kinds-- buildings, urban design, urban spaces. Progressively, through my studies and then my postgraduate studies, I was much more interested to understand how people perceive, let's say, our designs .What's the perception, what's the feeling space is creating? So my research is trying to understand how a pedestrian or a set of pedestrians experience the city and how the environment affects them psychologically, cognitively, and in other ways.”Some of the methods he uses include electroencephalography and GPS tracking, which he uses to determine how pedestrians react to different places, as well as how their memory of a place relates to their in-the-moment experience. That in turn leads to a fair bit qualitative inquiry for a mixed methods approach.“So we can use each method to validate the other,” Mavros explains. “So we can say, for example, that people's self-reported data--what they remember or what they made of an experience or a situation or a place-- is in lineor is not in line with the continuous data of their emotional arousal, excitement, attention, and so on.”The video –which you can watch for free by clicking here — is part of SAGE Research Methods Video . It’s an extensive collection, with almost 500 titles and more than 125 hours of total video.SAGE Video offerings are close captioned but also include a searchable transcript that’s clickable to that point in the video, so when Mavros shows some of the EEG findings, you can go directly there in the video by clicking on the text. They also include citation information and the ability to make your own clips from the longer video. You can share via e-mail or social media, save to a playlist, and speed up of slow down play.To view this particular video, for free, click here.For more about SAGE Video Research Methods Video, click here.