Visible and invisible in the visual data. Video-analysis in education: methodological issues

The current paper contributes to the contemporary debate on field research methods in education, using a specific research example to explore the theme of video analysis (Jordan & Anderson, 1995) with particular reference to studying educational interactions among adults and children in early childhood contexts. Video analysis, as yet little debated within the scientific community, raises “a series of [methodological and practical] issues that urgently need to be tackled” (Knoblauch, Schnettler, Raab & Soeffner 2012, p. 14). Of these, I will examine in particular: the need to explicate the theoretical criteria underpinning and potentially undermining the analysis of visual data; the ecological value of procedures for analysing visual data, that are rigorous but not abstracted from the natural setting (the educational contexts) in which the video-recorded interactions take place; striking the “right balance” between the microanalysis of interactive behaviours and the dimension of the meanings attributed to them