The visual vernacular: embracing photographs in research.

Jennifer Cleland,Anna Macleod

doi:10.1007/s40037-021-00672-x

Abstract

The increasing use of digital images for communication and interaction in everyday life can give a new lease of life to photographs in research. In contexts where smartphones are ubiquitous and many people are “digital natives”, asking participants to share and engage with photographs aligns with their everyday activities and norms more than textual or analogue approaches to data collection. Thus, it is time to consider fully the opportunities afforded by digital images and photographs for research purposes. This paper joins a long-standing conversation in the social science literature to move beyond the “linguistic imperialism” of text and embrace visual methodologies. Our aim is to explain the photograph as qualitative data and introduce different ways of using still images/photographs for qualitative research purposes in health professions education (HPE) research: photo-documentation, photo-elicitation and photovoice, as well as use of existing images. We discuss the strengths of photographs in research, particularly in participatory research inquiry. We consider ethical and philosophical challenges associated with photography research, specifically issues of power, informed consent, confidentiality, dignity, ambiguity and censorship. We outline approaches to analysing photographs. We propose some applications and opportunities for photographs in HPE, before concluding that using photographs opens up new vistas of research possibilities.Supplementary InformationThe online version of this article (10.1007/s40037-021-00672-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Highlights

Smartphones, tablets, and other devices are increasingly embedded in everyday life, influencing how many people interact, think, behave and connect with other people [1, 2]
The increasing use of digital images for communication and interaction in everyday life has given a new lease of life to a source of research data long
230 The visual vernacular: embracing photographs in research embraced by sociology and anthropology [4, 5]

Summary

Introduction

Smartphones, tablets, and other devices are increasingly embedded in everyday life, influencing how many people interact, think, behave and connect with other people [1, 2]. By viewing and discussing photos together, the researcher and participant actively co-construct meaning In this way photo-elicitation offers a way to potentially enrich and extend existing interview methodologies and give a combination of visual and verbal data for analysis purposes [27]. If the main source of data is not the photographs themselves but the transcripts from photo-elicited discussions, this may still privilege participants who are more skilled verbally—maintaining the “linguistic imperialism” of text, or, more accurately, of transcribed responses [8] While this criticism cannot be wholly dismissed, the many empirical studies referred to in this paper suggest that photographs help make abstract ideas accessible and encourage reflection in groups which are less literate and who do not routinely engage in reflection. We suggest that one or two pictures in an article can support key evidential points, with additional data made available electronically

Ethical considerations associated with photographs in research

Conclusion