Coding Video Data, Audio Data, and Images

Abstract

The tremendous technical progress made in recent years means that we can now take amazingly high-quality photos and video recordings with commercially available smartphones. And this, in turn, has opened up new opportunities for empirical research and the areas of field research and educational research in particular. Now virtually all researchers can produce high-quality video recordings in the field—at no cost. Consequently, there has also been a steadily growing need to be able to analyze this type of data material scientifically and to treat it in a similar methodological manner to interview or focus groups. As a method of data collection, video has of course led to great progress, especially for research into nonverbal behavior. In contrast to previous logging of observations, it is now possible to watch scenes repeatedly and have them coded by several people at different times, which significantly improves the quality of the analysis. In addition to working with videos, this chapter will also cover how to code and analyze still images, such as photos and screenshots of web pages.