As a method of data collection, video has of course led to great progress, especially for research into nonverbal behavior. Consequently, there has also been a steadily growing need to be able to analyze this type of data material scientifically and to treat it in a similar methodological manner to interview or focus groups. Now virtually all researchers can produce high-quality video recordings in the field-at no cost. And this, in turn, has opened up new opportunities for empirical research and the areas of field research and educational research in particular. The tremendous technical progress made in recent years means that we can now take amazingly high-quality photos and video recordings with commercially available smartphones. Video data is multidimensional, appeals to different senses, and can affect the viewer much more potently than texts can. You can begin to explore images and video recordings, too-a task that is certainly very different from exploring textual data. In this first phase of your analysis, you will not only get to know your material, but you will also begin to build a large network of connections, comments, ideas, and hypotheses. But digital tools are far more powerful, because text passages can be linked to each other, for example, as well as to other documents, websites, images, or geographical locations. At first, working with digitized texts may seem much like working with a physical reference book. You can make notes and comments, record questions and ideas, highlight anything that seems important, and search for words or word combinations in texts using lexical search functions. The software will not do this for you, but it does provide a number of tools to support you in your explorative work. Qualitative data analysis is a fascinating and rewarding process that challenges researchers to properly engage with their material and explore it in great detail.

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