The paper presents a visual methods approach from a cross national methodological project that used digital visual technologies to examine the young child's perspective in father-child interactions. The approach combines capturing the dialectic with visual reflexivity. The notion of 'capturing the dialectic' specifically by analysing conflict to gather the child's intention as their perspective, is underpinned by finding the contradictions in a situation of which children are a part. Visual technologies and in particular digital film does this, because it can identify difference, as it observes and captures the dialectic process. Researchers collected between 5-10 hours of film footage and twenty-four film elicitation interviews from young children and their fathers in twelve families within England, Hong Kong, Norway and India. In the study, participants took footage of routine father-child interactions chosen by the children; and researchers sampled the footage for situations of conflict and emotionally charged moments in order to capture the dialectic. Researchers then conducted film elicitation interviews with the children and fathers, which were recorded for the purpose of visual reflexivity. This visual methods approach can support social science researchers to address differences in representation and truth, for a better understanding of a young child's perspective in cross-national projects.
Although existing notions of reflexivity address the positionality of researchers, they rarely consider the processes through which methods and methodologies can come about. This study builds children's reflexivity into the research design. Drawing on footage from a pilot visual ethnography of paternal engagement in home environments, we show first, that at one level, building children's reflexivity into data collection and analysis, allows us to look at the relationship between the child, technology and the subject of their images; thereby establishing a position from which their perspective is produced. We found that their age and the particular visual technology used, shaped how the children positioned themselves and in turn, the kind of representations we gathered. As this was a collaborative study with a film maker and also involving discussions of film findings with teachers; a more general level reflexive analysis allowed us generate different viewpoints from which their perspectives were produced.
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