Working in real-life organisational settings, our approach to data collection is based on video ethnography. Video data allows for fine-grained analyses of what people do, feel and think. Video observation points in the direction of a third person perspective, but we also engage in ethnographic interviews that allow us to collect data that gives participant relevant perspectives on their doing, feeling and thinking.
Having collected video data, our main method for analysing the data is Cognitive Event Analysis. This method is a procedure that starts with the identification of relevant changes in the flow of interactivity in the situation. From this event pivot, the method tracks the preceding activities that led the participant to bring about the result. The method thus combines a systematic approach to how cognition unfolds with a humanistic concern for the patterns that connect up the particulars of a given event.
We also seek other ways of explaining the significance of behavioural and verbal patterns in the flow of interactivity. Therefore, we relate Cognitive Event Analysis to not only the dynamical systems perspective developed in ecological and systemic psychology, but also humanistic theories that include dialogism and phenomenology.