This is a working draft of a booklet on
conducting qualitative research using a camcorder. Much of it is the
product of my research with children in an elementary school located in
North Georgia. While I was conducting that research, which eventually
resulted in a dissertation at The University of Georgia, I kept careful
notes on video and audio data collection methods. I regularly experimented
with different ways of collecting data with one and sometimes two
camcorders (the second used by an assistant who videotaped me videotaping
children), as well as using various ways of collecting audio data, to
discover what approaches worked best for different situations.
While my dissertation emphasized
the social groupings of children in the school hallway, I also gave
considerable attention--four chapters --to
the methods used in collecting and analyzing my data. After writing the
dissertation and obtaining my doctorate, I went back and examined my
methodological notes again to discover in greater detail the effects of my
experimenting with video and audio collection techniques, an issue
mentioned but not elaborated in my dissertation.
This first draft was written in
1996. An abbreviated version of this book was published as a chapter in
Qualitative
Research in Psychology, edited by
Paul Camic, et. al., and published by the American Psychological
Association in 2003. The video segments described in the latter source are
available online, if you have Windows Media Player enabled on your web
browser. Click here
to see the video.
Five additional video segments of
the hallway and three video segments of the school playground are also
available. Click
here and
scroll down the page to find links to these video segments.
I hope that you may find some useful
ideas in my comments. I appreciate any feedback you wish to offer. I'm
sure there are areas where it needs more attention. Perhaps someone will
work with the manuscript, share authorship, and see it published, but for
now I am happy if it encourages you to use video in your research and
gives you some ideas of how to do it.
Don Ratcliff, Ph.D.
Chapters converted to PDF
files 8-18-04
Note that
some of these files are pdf format and require Adobe Reader, which can be
downloaded without charge by clicking here.
