Screenshotting What’s Important in Video Data: An Experiment in Collaborative, Subjective Analysis of Artifactual, Cultural Research with Children

Abstract

When using video and visual methods in qualitative and post-qualitative research, the size and scale of the data set can be overwhelming, particularly for new researchers. Collaborative research teams often work with a code book to systematize and unify their analyses. Interpretive researchers pursuing multi-layered and multi-voiced visual analysis often find it difficult to move away from desires for a single ‘best’ interpretation of what happened. This paper illustrates and interrogates an open and flexible method for ‘thinning’ (screenshotting) video data that we call the ‘Five Images Method’. We offer one unfolding of interpretive processes and tensions and examine how four researchers worked across positionalities to analyse video data. We start with our positionalities in relation to a research study of children creating photographic and written stories of cultural artifacts, carried out over one year. The primary data from the study was generated through online video-conference sessions connecting a university researcher with an elementary class. A second level of data was created through a process of screenshotting, followed by recursive cycles of conversation about the choices of each researcher, and how they were guided by background, geography, roles in relation to child participants, technologies, personal experiences, and so on. Two key incidents that illustrate the potential of the method and the interpretations produced are described. We argue that reducing video data in this way can be both generative and limiting, while also serving as a catalyst for enhanced analysis. The collaborations and relationships built in research teams through slow processes of analysis (and writing!) working across difference also promote evocative and layered learning. Looking at interpretations as multiple can be hampered by longstanding histories of research as intended to produce authentic and singular truths.