Observing Ordinary Conflicts

The study of interpersonal conflict and violence has long been plagued by the inaccessibility of situations where these interactions take place. To overcome this, we collected and analyzed video footage of 62 real-life conflicts from public spaces in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Through observation and analysis of these videos, we first describe what ordinary conflicts actually look like. Second, we describe the various experiences we had as researchers watching this footage and discuss how these might be related to the nature of the material. Through this analysis, we aim to both describe ordinary conflicts so other researchers will know what to expect of these situations and prepare researchers for what it is like to work with this new and promising empirical material.