Re: video analysis

Hiroaki Ishiguro (h-ishi who-is-at ipc.miyakyo-u.ac.jp)
Wed, 20 Sep 1995 13:40:26 -0700

Hello! Angel
Thank you for response and sorry for my late reply.

At 9:29 AM 95.9.14 -0400, Angel M.Y. Lin wrote:

>I'm interested in your work on "anti-individualism" in psychology, and
>your methodology in video analysis of anaual psychological meetings in
>Japan; could you tell us more about them? I do a lot of analysis of
>classroom lessons using video-recordings, too; and that's why I'm
>interested in knowing how other people do it as well. My thesis supervisor
>is a conversation analyst and I've been trained in that methodology, but I'm
>also interested in learning about other ways of approaching video data!
>

I held one symposium about a new approach to practice(that is, socio
historical activity) in the annual meeting in Japanese Developmental
psychological association this year. The title was ' Reconsider
development -Beyond individualism -'. I was a directer of the
symposium and invited three speakers from three research domains. Yutaka
Sayeki who is a cognitive scientist on education, Kozue Saito who is a
developmental psychologist,
especially on language development and Yoshitaka Seiya who is a
sociologist on education, each of them told his or her methodology to
analize the practice.
There were much interesting points in their talks. But one of main topic
was the position
of the researcher. For example, Kozue Saito told her research experience
in a nursery school. She often observed nursery school children and
teachers, and got the data about them. But recently she got an idea about
a research as communication among participants which include children,
teachers, parents and researchers. All of the participants make the
nursery community together. In traditional way, a researcher
objectifies each child as an isolated object and occasionally reduce
him/her into his/her mental elements. However, a child lives not as a
biological living thing but as one of the specific nursery school child in
the nursery community. That is our foundamental plane to discuss. Sayeki
discussed the development in community by his theory related with LPP.
Seiya explained an ethnomethodological standpoint to analyse a practice and
emphasized that data are not in an opposite side of a researcher but it
includes a researcher's interpretation.
In this plane, where is the position of the researcher in the
community? This is an open question for us. After this symposium, we
have discontinuous serial workshops titled ' Description of practice'.
Description is a theoretical act as Ochs, E described.
Psychology have many tool to grasp individual elements but few for
participants' activity
in community. First of all, we choiced to take a video analysis. About
ten members analyse same video tape about one of a nursery school
acivities recorded by me. The difference give us an information that the
data are related with researcher's research goal, intention, theory and so
on. Now we finished three reports. We discussed the way of
transcription, the treatment of social information( social structure,
parents' situation, institutional constraints, etc.) out of video tape
,etc. We seek the valuable questions for each of members through this
workshop. It is difficult to explain in detail the way of analysis
without data. I hope we will report our idea after the workshop.
I would like to know your way of analysis and any problems related with a
video analysis.
Thanks for your collaboration.

>P.S. Does your name mean broad, generous, light?

Yes. Do you know Japanese characters?

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   H I R O A K I I S H I G U R O

Department of Educational Psychology, Faculty of Education,
Miyagi University of Education
Aramaki Aza Aoba, Aoba-ku, Sendai, 980 Japan
Phone/Fax:022-214-3523 E-mail :h-ishi who-is-at ipc.miyakyo-u.ac.jp
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