USING VIDEO TECHNIQUE TO CAPTURE PRESCHOOL CHILDREN’S PARTICIPATION

Exploring preschool children’s actions to reveal the way they participate in health care situations is a methodological challenge. This challenge lays in capturing children’s expressions, spoken words and body language. Using video technique during observation offers an opportunity to reveal small changes in children’s expressions that might be failed to secure when using the human eye solely. However, video observation is not only about pushing the ‘rec-button’. It requires both methodological and ethical considerations in advance: What is to be in focus during the video observation? What decides when each observation begins and ends? How much time must be devoted for fieldwork and complementary work? Further, the researcher needs to get informed consent from everyone involved. Constant reflexivity during the initial phase, video observations, transcriptions and analysis is also important as the researcher’s presence will influence the final outcome. When transcribing, the researcher’s predetermined focus guides the selection about what to transcribe. To accomplish a selection when transcribing is necessarily to not get lost in the gathered data. The opportunities to see the same sequence several times and to share the observations with a more experienced researcher can contribute to trustworthiness. Therefore, to describe and discuss video observation as a methodological issue is important. Video observations provide rich and thick information that can bring understanding to children’s participation in a detailed and varied way.