This film explores an interactionist approach to obesity: Part 1: shows how cultural and environmental changes have altered our relationship with food and created an ‘obesogenic environment’. But why isn’t everyone obese? …
Sampling is crucial in psychology but can be difficult to understand. This film offers a helping hand with a series of visual images that take students through target population, samples, representativeness and generalisability. It then looks at how sampling is done, illustrating differences between…
After every war someone has to tidy up. Things won’t pick\ themselves up, after all. Sweet Smoke of the Fatherland begins with these lines from the poem ‘The End and the Beginning’ by the Polish Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska. The documentary tells the story of three old…
Correlations are relationships and this film begins by illustrating how the strength and direction of those relationships is measured. It then uses real research studies to illustrate the uses of correlations, their limitations and how easily correlation data can be misused.
Two men from East Germany come together in a historic reconciliation; one was a dissident who was sent to prison, the other spied on him for the Stasi. Today, with access to secret Stasi files, the two men begin to revisit their painful past and reflect on their differing roles in the regime. What unfolds…
True Dutch eyes is a film about the work of a Dutch photographer called Dana Lixenberg who’s living in New York. She’s specialised in portraits but calls herself a documentary photographer. Her work looks technically simple while the power of her work arises from the intimity with the people…
Some research questions can only really be studied by sociologists getting out of their offices and interacting directly with the people they want to study. Starting with the famous Chicago School of sociology, this film uses both contemporary (Ferrell) and classic (Patrick, Holdaway, Humphries,…
How do school students negotiate the pressures to perform well academically alongside the pressure to be popular and cool? Carolyn Jackson combined questionnaires and interviews to research this question and this film uses her study, Lads and Ladettes, to illustrate why these methods are chosen,…
This feature documentary examines the history of the World War II American incarceration prisons for 122,000 people of Japanese ancestry within the so called “War Relocation Administration” with a focus on the “Citizen Isolation Centers”. United States citizens who were deemed…
En route to a party in Paris, France, Akin, a black actor from Dallas, bonds unexpectedly with Aziz, a driver from Morocco, who says his cab is the "Karaoke Taxi." As Aziz winds through the streets of Montmartre, Akin starts singing with him, much to the amazement of the filmmaker, iPhone in…
The setting is simple, but the stories, songs, and poems of Osceola Mays are remarkable indeed. In them, the past is recounted with a reverent intensity that expresses the deeply felt emotions of three generations of black Texans. The harsh realities of segregation and discrimination are juxtaposed with…
An entertainer for nearly seventy years, Al Howard, One Man Band, could be seen outside local businesses in his trailer singing and playing his instruments in Grand Prairie Texas.
