Qualitative analysis of video data: Standards and heuristics

Video research is an increasingly important method in the learning sciences. Video provides unique analytical affordances to researchers but also presents unique tensions, many of which have not yet been adequately addressed in the literature. The authors of this symposium draw on their diverse experiences, analyzing a variety of video corpuses, to provide theoretical and methodological standards and heuristics for the process of video analysis. We focus on three themes central to the process of video analysis that would benefit from increased theoretical and methodological attention: transcription tensions, defining the unit of analysis, and representing context. We discuss how our approaches to video analysis are framed by theory and how we have applied them to specific datasets, to answer a variety of research questions. In doing so, we make explicit some crosscutting methodological norms and invite continued discussion about these norms from multiple analytic traditions.