An analytical model for studying the development of learners’ mathematical ideas and reasoning using videotape data☆

This article explores how individuals, both alone and together, examine exhibits in museums and galleries. Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, it focuses on the ways in which visitors encounter and experience exhibits and how their activities are organized, at least in part, with intimate regard to the actions of others in the domain, both companions and “ strangers.” This study contributes to the long-standing concerns of symbolic interactionism with (mutual) attention and involvement, materiality and social relations, and interpersonal communication. The data consist of video recordings of naturally occurring action and interaction in various museums and galleries. While guidebooks may suggest what a visitor should look at, and even the route that he or she should follow— and the meanings that the single individual might read into the objects encountered along the way— will only rarely coincide with the strategic thinking of the Museum’ s planners. How a visitor interacts with artworks and their settings is determined by personal needs, associations, biases, and fantasies rather than by institutional recommendations. In considering this history— that of response to, and reception of, the collections— the issue is not with the Museum dee ned by its ofe cial aims and aspirations, but with how it is reconstituted in the individual imagination. — Malcolm Baker and Brenda Richardson, A Grand Design Participation framework: when a word is spoken all those who happen to be in perceptual range of the event will have some sort of participation status relative to it. The codie cation of these various positions and the normative specie cations of appropriate conduct with each provide an essential background for interaction analysis— whether (I presume) in our own society or any other. — Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk

/pdf/exhibiting-interaction-conduct-and-collaboration-in-museums-5455oju0jc.pdf

Exhibiting Interaction: Conduct and Collaboration in Museums and Galleries

Visual research is still a rather dispersed and ill-defined domain within the social sciences. Despite a heightened interest in using visuals in research, efforts toward a more unified conceptual and methodological framework for dealing vigilantly with the specifics of this (relatively) new way of scholarly thinking and doing remain sparse and limited in scope. In this article, the author proposes a more encompassing and refined analytical framework for visual methods of research. The ‘‘Integrated Framework’’ tries to account for the great variety within each of the currently discerned types or methods. It does so by moving beyond the more or less arbitrary and often very hybridly defined modes and techniques, with a clear focus on what connects or transcends them. The second part of the article discusses a number of critical issues that have been raised while unfolding the framework. These issues continue to pose a challenge to a more visual social science, but can be turned into opportunities for advanc...

Visual Sociology Reframed: An Analytical Synthesis and Discussion of Visual Methods in Social and Cultural Research:

A framework is developed for computer‐assisted analysis of event sequences like those obtained through sociological field work or historical research. The analytic procedures produce a qualitative model — including a graph displaying logical relations among events — which accounts for the input data. The model can be tested and refined through analysis of additional data.

Modeling event structures

The degree to which researcher 
generated visual records (for example video texts) may be used to collect valid 
information about the social world is subject to considerable academic debate 
(cf. 
Feld and Williams, 1975; Gottdiener, 1979 and Grimshaw, 1982). On the one 
hand the method is assumed, by implication, to have limited impact on the data, 
the 
taped image being treated as a replica of the unrecorded event (Vihman and 
Greenlee, 1987; Vuchinich, 1986). On the other, it is suggested that the video 
camera has a uniquely distorting effect on the researched phenomenon 
(Gottdiener, 
1979:61; Heider, 1976:49). Research participants, it is argued, demonstrate a 
reactive effect to the video process such that data is meaningful only if 
special 
precautions are taken to validate it. Strategies suggested include a covert 
approach to 
the data collection itself (cf. Eibl-Eibesfeldt and Haass, 1974, Gottdiener, 
1979; 
Albrecht, 1985) or the application of triangulative techniques such as 
respondent 
validation (Gottdiener, 1979; Albrecht, 1985 and Arborelius and Timpka, 1990).

In this paper we suggest that both these views are problematic. The insistence 
of one 
on marginalising the role of the research process and the other on attempting to 
separate 
the process from the research data is at the expense of exploring the degree to 
which the 
process helps socially and interactionally produce the data. As we demonstrate, 
the 
activity of data collection is constitutive of the very interaction which is 
then 
subsequently available for investigation. A reflexive analysis of this 
relationship is 
therefore essential. Video generated data is an ideal resource in as far as it 
can provide a 
faithful record of the process as an aspect of the naturally occurring 
interaction which 
comprises the research topic.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.5153/sro.1372

Recording Social Life: Reflexivity and Video Methodology

Advances in film and video technology in recent years have made in increasingly feasible for students of social interaction to record, for fine-grained analyses, sound-image records (SIR). Such records have two principal advantages: density and permanence. Optimal data continues to require that investigators attend to ethnographic grounding and other criteria of data adequacy. The questions of what constitutes naturally occurring interaction and of the objectivity of SIR devices are briefly discussed.

Sound-Image Data Records for Research on Social Interaction: Some Questions and Answers

There are risks to individuals whose behaviors are recorded for use in social research; the risks are ordinarily less than those to subjects of biomedical research or even some behavioral experiments—and are phenomenally similar to those faced in all interaction. Unwarranted inferences about groups or categories of people based on examination of SIR constitute a potentially greater but less specifiable danger. The calculation of risks and benefits is not an easy one—privacy and injury are vague notions. Several examples are discussed and some issues particularly requiring specification are identified.

Allen D. Grimshaw

Papers

Sound-Image Data Records for Research on Social Interaction: Some Questions and Answers

Whose Privacy? What Harm?

Foreword: Special Issue on Sound-Image Records in Social Interaction Research