ABSTRACT
Video records have several properties that fundamentally change the way that inquiry takes place and video is now the standard data collection tool for studies of human interaction. This section of the book focuses on the contribution of video-based research to our understanding of learning and development in peer, family, and informal learning contexts. The authors who made contributions to this section are taking up fundamental questions about the processes and outcomes of learning as they emerge in the context of interactions between people, and between people and their physical and cultural environments. We are fortunate that these researchers were willing to share both their struggles in collecting and analyzing video records and the strategies, insights, and techniques they have developed after years of working with video as a data source. In this prefatory chapter, I begin with a discussion of how video has been an important data source for research investigating learning. I provide a summary of some of the theoretical insights that have emerged from studies that relied on film or video, drawing on the published literature including early efforts to use video as an analytic and rhetorical tool by anthropologists, developmental and social psychologists, and sociologists. In the second section, I summarize some of the challenges that video data presents, again drawing on the chapters and the broader literature. In the third section, I share four main methodological and analytical suggestions that emerged across the seven chapters and connect these to more general insights on qualitative research. These ideas should help both novice and seasoned researchers design and carry out research that includes video records as a data source. No rules are offered here; rather, the goal is to collectively enrich our methodological and analytic creativity and become smarter about some of the challenges that video-derived data presents. Across the group of chapters, we have access to a range of approaches and there are an endless number of strategies that might be developed to fruitfully use video as a data source.
