The records of the IPS study are primarily of two types: 1. parental notes on development in text form, ordered serially by count of days since birth; 2. video clips created by nearly weekly recording of thematically segregated clips of “experiments” or “play sessions” of the infant in her nuclear family. The thousand clips online at NLCSA.net are flashbacks to snippets of a past life with both considerable variety and recurrent concerns and themes. What issues of method are central for analysis of this case study material?
Interpretation: How can we make sense of the fragmentary ensemble while not under-valuing the variety?
Our primary objective is to explore processes of learning in the settings and relationships of everyday life. Our strategy is select material from the corpus involving Peggy with other agents, settings, and things, ordering them by her time-line from birth, organizing the materials into collections by the primary focus; for example, all the material involving both Peggy and the family pet, Scurry, a young Scotch Terrier, is integrated in the thread “withScurry,” the first topical post. Subsequently, other posts will be developed involving Peggy’s interactions with others of the family, e.g. “withRobby” is second.
Other categories of threads are planned. These will be identified by a portmanteau title (where “Peggy” is an assumed first term) involving relational prepositions and specifiers: initial example list: e.g. (Peggy)withScurry; (Peggy)andPuzzles
1. withAgent: withMiriam, withMom, withDad (aka Bob)
2. inConstraints: lap, infant-seat, high-chair, crib, playpen, …
3. withinActivity-space: playpen, family-room, kitchen, bath, bedrooms, porch, …
4. andObjects: eating-tools, hygiene-tools, activity-toys, animal-toys, spatial-toys, found-objects, etc.
5. whenActivity: exploring-body, crawling, in-rolling-walker, walking, singing, pointing, chasingScurry
Such a list can go as far as the information requires and language permits.
Our tactical bias is to begin as simply as possible, in the process enhancing concrete familiarity with the materials and experience with the tools technology makes available for use. For example, “withScurry” is the first thread, collecting material about relationships and communication. It involves 15 vignettes and 10 video Clips. “WithRobby,” engaging 19 vignettes and 28 video Clips is a second.
It is our intention to focus on other categories of threads next. Choices will be made in an order determined by an overview of developments guided by information in the collection of vignettes as well as by common knowledge of infant development.
Discovery: How can we uncover important aspects and events of learning not originally in focus?
As we spin other threads from the strands of relatable information, cross-linking themes are certain to come into high relief. That dimension of exploration will be an organizing focus for what is more analysis than these primary threads unpacking video and integrating strands. Those analyses will predictably fit within frameworks of our theoretical orientations.
In contrast, This activity, unpacking the content of audio-video records, is likely to be the effort where we will discover unlooked-for incidents that surprise us and may lead to new perspectives. Here’s one example in the thread withScurry.
Recall that withScurry is about Peggy and the Scotty, her lone playmate of infant years in our family, of comparable size, language command, energy and speed.
It was NOT expected to be revealing of Peggy’s learning about objects. Consider now in post withScurry at day #408: Note Peggy’s reaction on seeing the circular rolling path of a paper cup (a truncated, right regular cone). Was this a phenomenon new to her? She was clearly interested, even excited. Within the ClipNotes for P58A (accessed by the link above the video pane), see episode A for a description of her reaction to the path of motion of a cup she drops accidentally: her delight; her turning to her Mom to see if She noticed the event, and her successive experiments to recreate the cup’s behavior.
What does one make of this unplanned, unanticipated behavior – even unnoticed at the time and until the Analyst was undertaking micro-episode analysis with other ends in mind? My appreciation of this incident, as Analyst, is this:
1. from her earliest days,Peggy’s interaction with objects was dominantly physically active. She would reach out for an object she could see. She would flail with her arms and hands striking at objects and occasionally thereby bringing them within grasp. She would take the object to her mouth, most often dropping it thereafter.
2. In her highchair, she would purposefully move an object off the edge of her tray and drop it, then lean over the arm of the highchair to see what happened.
3. Among her spatial toys collection, she would most commonly throw them (plausibly to see what the specific toy did upon being thrown).
4. This incident shows her delight in witnessing an unusual behavior after propelling an object (a boomerang effect).
5. Taken together, these suggest we should imagine Peggy’s schemes of functional classification are primarily about “when I perform act X from my repertoire, this object may respond in way Y.”
Conclusions?
However fragmentary this captured record may be, since Peggy was building a self, a portable suite of perspectives, competences, feelings and memories in the various experiences she moved through, we may expect to find everywhere incidents related to and revealing aspects of her learning, of various application, no matter how we organize our collection of captured experiences. And, therefore:
We need to look at the detail with a keen eye, an open mind, and deep recall.
We need case study analysis.
