The aim is to discuss advantages and challenges in using extensive video recordings from a participant perspective as a way of studying children's daily interaction in- and outside of school. We claim that to better understand how learning in interaction is construed, one benefits from capturing the child’s entire day for an extensive period of time. To extensively record children’s everyday life is a methodological and practical challenge, as well as an ethical one. In this paper, we will focus on the ethical issues that arise when involving the children and families in the data collection.

The last decade has seen an increase both in studies using video and studies considering learning and development social and interactive phenomena that is situated in the interaction between individuals. By conceptualizing learning and development as a social and interactive phenomena, learning is considered as situated in social situations and contexts where participants are engaged in mutual social actions (cf. Enfield & Levinson 2006, Lave 1993, Melander & Sahlström 2010). In other words, there is a direct connection between learning and interaction. This view on learning and development is in contrast to the view of learning as something that happens in the individual’s mind.

In this period of theoretical change of the understanding of learning, the use of video has increasingly been used by researchers as a way of capturing participants engaged in mutual social actions, largely because of the availability of affordable and usable video technology. Video provides powerful ways of collecting, analyzing and archiving as well as sharing detailed material of human interaction. (cf Aarsand 2010).

Homes of families have long been sites for ethnographic participant observation and the number of these studies is steadily increasing (Aarsand 2010). These studies have often relied on interviews and participant observation with audio recordings, not cameras. In classroom research cameras were used already in the 1960s (e.g. Bellack et al 1966).  One reason for the small number of research using video may be that the home is considered a private space. It may be considered rude and intrusive to enter a home with a camera. It may also be because of the challenge in getting access to families’ homes (Aarsand 2010). Ethics are always important to consider when conducting research, but it is particularly important when studying people in their own homes and at their most private. Examples of ethnographic research using video recordings are Forsberg 2009 and Ochs et al. 2006.

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