1.1 Interaction Analysis¹

Interaction Analysis as we describe it here is an interdisciplinary method for the empirical investigation of the interaction of human beings with each other and with objects in their environment. It investigates human activities such as talk, nonverbal interaction, and the use of artifacts and technologies, identifying routine practices and problems and the resources for their solution. Its roots lie in ethnography (especially participant observation), sociolinguistics, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, kinesics, proxemics, and ethology.

Video technology has been vital in establishing Interaction Analysis which depends on the technology of audiovisual recording for its primary records and on playback capability² for their analysis. Only electronic recording produces the kind of data corpus that allows the close interrogation required for Interaction Analysis. In particular, it provides the crucial ability to replay a sequence of interaction repeatedly for multiple viewers, and on multiple occasions.

Interaction Analysis as a distinct method is just beginning to be differentiated from other kinds of video-based analyses. It is not taught per se in any university curriculum; however, there is a growing number of practitioners doing video-based Interaction-Analytic work who contribute methods, approaches, and findings to the practices of an emerging community of practitioners of Interaction Analysis. In this paper we describe the work of researchers loosely associated in one way or another with two laboratories dedicated to Interaction Analysis: the first operated at Michigan State University (MSU) between 1975 and 1988; the second functions as a joint venture between Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and the Institute for Research on Learning (IRL) in Palo Alto, California. While the MSU Interaction Analysis Laboratory often focused on medical settings, the Palo Alto group is particularly concerned with the study of human-machine interaction, collaborative design practice, and the situated nature of skill and knowledge acquisition³. Both laboratories have had on-going work groups and a policy of encouraging participation by researchers seeking to learn about Interaction Analysis.

1.2 Framing Assumptions

No method is without theoretical assumptions. Methods, far from being neutral tools, promote both concrete working practices and theoretical ideas. Practitioners of Interaction Analysis, though they come from many different disciplines and use the results of their analyses for many different purposes, also share a more or less explicit view of the world that is displayed and reinforced by the work of doing this kind of analysis. Furthermore, they hold a common set of ideas about how to gain access to that world, i.e. what are possible "ways into" the phenomena of interest. A clear formulation of these framing assumptions does not yet exist, and there is likely to be some disagreement about which assumptions are more or less fundamental. Nevertheless, we believe it is important to begin to make the theoretical grounding of our work explicit. The following comments are offered in the hope of stimulating increasing clarity as Interaction Analysis emerges as a coherent way of doing analytic work.

One basic underlying assumption in Interaction Analysis is that knowledge and action are fundamentally social in origin, organization, and use, and are situated in particular social and material ecologies. Thus, expert knowledge and practice are seen not so much as located in the heads of individuals but as situated in the interactions between members of a particular community engaged with the material world. Seeing cognition as socially and ecologically distributed has methodological consequences: Interaction Analysis finds its basic data for theorizing about knowledge and practice not in traces of cranial activity (for example, protocol or survey interview data), but in the details of social interactions in time and space, and particularly in the naturally occurring, everyday interactions between members of communities of practice⁴. On this view, artifacts and technologies set up a social field within which certain activities become very likely, others possible, and still others very improbable or impossible. The goal of Interaction Analysis, then, is to identify regularities in the ways in which participants utilize the resources of the complex social and material world of actors and objects within which they operate.

Another widely shared assumption among practitioners of Interaction Analysis is that verifiable observation provides the best foundation for analytic knowledge of the world. This view implies a commitment to grounding theories of knowledge and action in empirical evidence, that is, to building generalizations from records of particular, naturally occurring activities, and steadfastly holding our theories accountable to that evidence. Underlying this attitude is the assumption that the world is accessible ansensible not only to participants in daily human interaction but also to analysts when they observe such interaction on videotape. Analytic work, then, draws, at least in part, on our experience and expertise as competent members of ongoing social systems and functioning communities of practice.

While not yet well articulated, the domain of questions of interest to Interaction Analysis revolves around the achievement of social order (and ordering) in everyday settings. A set of "analytic foci" (see section 6) is emerging that begins to specify the domain of questions that Interaction Analysis asks of the world represented on tape. Predominant among these are questions having to do with how people make sense of each others' actions as meaningful, orderly, and projectable.⁵ Since locally sensible interaction is seen as the collaborative achievement of participants, our work as analysts lies precisely in specifying the ways in which participants make this orderliness and projectability apparent to each other and incidentally to us, the analysts. We look for the mechanisms through which participants assemble and employ the social and material resources inherent in their situations for getting their mutual dealings done.

As we apply Interaction Analysis to learning processes, these same kinds of framing assumptions remain relevant. Interaction-Analytic studies see learning as a distributed, ongoing social process, where evidence that learning is occurring or has occurred must be found in understanding the ways in which people collaboratively do learning and do recognizing learning as having occurred (Garfinkel, 1967). The following sections are devoted to explicating these notions.

1.3 Overview

The next section outlines procedures and ways of working that are typical for the practitioner communities of which we have been members. Section 3 examines the drawbacks and advantages of using video data, that is, our reasons for engaging in this type of analysis. Section 4 looks at the nature of video records in a section on "video and reality", while Section 5 considers the question of camera effects. This is followed in Section 6 by a discussion of some topical foci emerging as central in Interaction Analysis. Appendix A elaborates issues around transcription, Appendix B provides practical advice on how to shoot videotape suitable for Interaction Analysis, Appendix C contains notes on the ethics of recording and playback, and Appendices D through K contain figures referred to in the text.

Throughout this paper, we have worked from the premise that accounts of methods cannot be separated from accounts of findings and that the best way to talk about methods is to show instances of the actual work. While this may be less than elegant, and may, at times, dilute the methodological discussion with substantive findings, we take solace in the fact that emerging fields in general are more likely to disseminate their methods by example and apprenticeship than by formal description.⁶