An example of the dialogue between video, fieldnotes and interview data

The example below shows how fieldnotes, video recordings and post-meeting

conversational interviews were interwoven, and how the processes of data generation and analysis overlapped during fieldwork. This particular example has been chosen because it relates to a situation not included elsewhere in the thesis, where the post- meeting interview conversation included some reference to a strip of interaction which, according to the participant's account, I should be able to identify in the video recordings. The example illustrates my attempt to interpret a narrative provided by one participant Kerry, the university team's project manager, which does not seem to correspond either to my own direct experience of the meeting or to my later reading of the video images.

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About two-thirds of the way through the project, Kerry told me after a meeting that she had not asked Paul, one of the local authority officers - and the only local authority representative at this particular meeting - whether he approved of the project planning for the next event, even though she felt he looked really

uncomfortable during the conversation about it. She continued by saying that this was the reason she had asked him later in the meeting if there were any other issues he wanted to raise. Her silence therefore concerned a moment when she did not enquire about Paul's discomfort, compensated by a later invitation to him to raise anything that he would like to.

My fieldnotes of that meeting do not include any reference of my own to Paul looking uncomfortable. Nor is it something that Paul related independently in my interview with him after that meeting. When I watched the video again, during the footage of the discussion about the workshop, I did not detect any indication, either through his speech or body language, of Paul's discomfort. Kerry's description of asking Paul if there were any other issues he wanted to raise can, however, be matched to a strip of interaction that occurs towards the end of the meeting, at a point when they have just fixed a date for another event. Her question seems to be prompted after she looks down at her notebook for a few seconds and runs her eye down the page, apparently checking for further agenda items or issues for discussion.

I did not want to deny Kerry's post-meeting account, to subjugate her view to my own, but I was finding it difficult to read Kerry's account of her actions as being directly responsive to Paul's discomfort. On second viewing of the full video, the fact that Kerry's line manager is absent from this meeting caught my attention. Her talk about discomfort was now interesting to me for a different reason. She talks at the beginning about interacting with other research groups also doing collaborative

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inquiry work, and how she found their work incomprehensible. Kerry is having to describe and account all by herself in this meeting for the consultation events they are planning: she is using the speech genre of the university's research expertise without her line manager to guide her, possibly for the first time. The more I review the video footage of the meeting and read its content against previous discussions with Kerry, the greater the sense I get that it is not really Paul with whom Kerry is in dialogue: her talk seems to be reflecting other conversations and concerns from previous situations.

The following is taken from my fieldnote of a phone conversation with Kerry about four weeks after the meeting in question. At this point in the conversation, we had just started talking about how I was still busy with the transcription of that meeting, and what I was noticing from it:

I said, 'I've been really interested [while doing the transcript] because there were a couple of times [in the video interaction] when you referred to something which wasn't really in reply to what Paul had said, but referred to what you thought he was thinking, and that was interesting given what you had said afterwards to me about the conversation. For instance, [in the video] you were saying "don't worry about it [the consultation event] being too complicated". I had been wondering if you had already been worrying about that yourself and if the design team had been talking about it.'

'Yes definitely,' she said immediately, 'Yes, was that the meeting when we had just come back from [European trip]?'

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She said, 'We'd had one meeting and there was only a week to go, and it was a nightmare.'

Of course, this is an intersubjectively-produced line that I proposed and Kerry accepted and added to, through the reference to the European trip. What emerged from this point was a different way of talking between me and Kerry. Triggered by my response to the video footage, a theme of competence and its effect on speaking- up behaviour started to develop more strongly in our discussions: the stress of feeling incompetent and unknowledgeable, and how this inclines people towards keeping quiet, how her stress changed as she started to understand more about co- inquiry, and could better explain and justify what the university team was doing. Neither in Kerry's initial account of what she kept silent about in the meeting nor in the video-recorded conversation was there any reference to stress. It is a line that became increasingly coherent however as the data accumulated, and as the idea of stress became linked to the positioning of being new in the team. During her exit interview at the end of the project, Kerry noted:

None of those events was designed until the last one had taken place which was also what made it very stressful ..because it's like, two weeks before we didn't know what that exhibition was, we were responding to what had come out of the workshop, two weeks before, we went to [Europe], came back, bam. It was quite hard for me because at .. I didn't really know what I was doing ... I you know I, now I can talk about co-inquiry till the cows come home.

Overall in the research study, without the video recordings' detail to compare to the individual accounts and fieldnotes, I would have been unlikely to be prompted to ask

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about some of the potential lines of inquiry that were not immediately made relevant by the participants themselves. The combining of these different types of data did therefore seem to be productive. The first experience of the project meetings - as the meetings unfolded in real time - was captured in my fieldnotes, and emphasised the emotional content and my own embodied thoughts and observations. The

subsequent experiences of it, in video-replay form, with the benefit of the post- meeting interview data, produced new and alternative ways of reading the footage. These new readings highlighted the complex and sensitive inter-personal

negotiations that were impacting upon how the project unfolded.

While other authors have given objects directly to the research participants to encourage their talk (e.g. Slutskaya et al., 2012), the use of video in this case was almost an elicitation technique in reverse. The participants pointed to how the object of the video-recording should be viewed, and I as the researcher re-analysed. The elicitation process arose in me as a reflexive prompt. My comparison of participants' interview accounts, the meanings they gave to the interactions that had occurred, against the video recording raised more questions that could then be asked. My inferences came from a dialogue in which I was actively involved. I was also there in the interaction, the video recordings, and therefore had a reflexive contribution to make in the discussion about our shared experience of the project and the project meetings.

Nevertheless, there were also occasions where participants' accounts simply had no correlation to the video-recorded meeting interaction, where no reference was made to the detail of the project group meeting, and in such instances, the video recording was not utilised directly to explore the account further. One of the disadvantages of producing the video recordings was that possibly more attention was paid, both by

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me and participants, to the issue of silence purely within the meetings rather than within the social interaction of the project more generally.36