Video-stimulated accounts: Young children accounting for interactional matters in front of peers

Research in the early years places increasing importance on participatory methods to engage children. The playback of video-recording to stimulate conversation is a research method that enables children’s accounts to be heard and attends to a participatory view. During video-stimulated sessions, participants watch an extract of video-recording of a specific event in which they were involved, and then account for their participation in that event. Using an interactional perspective, this paper draws distinctions between video-stimulated accounts and a similar research method, popular in education, that of video-stimulated recall. Reporting upon a study of young children’s interactions in a playground, video-stimulated accounts are explicated to show how the participants worked toward the construction of events in the video-stimulated session. This paper discusses how the children account for complex matters within their social worlds, and manage the accounting of others in the video-stimulated session. When viewed from an interactional perspective and used alongside fine grained analytic approaches, video-stimulated accounts are an effective method to provide the standpoint of the children involved and further the competent child paradigm.