Towards the development of ethics guidelines for visual psychology: A review of relevant visual research ethics guidelines

Abstract

Visual research methods are increasingly popular within psychology and the social sciences. However, psychology has yet to develop its own specific ethics guidelines for visual research methods. Currently, psychologists undertaking visual and arts-based research draw on ethics guidelines developed by and for allied disciplines that have a more established tradition of visual research, such as visual anthropology and visual sociology. While many of the principles of existing ethics guidelines from allied disciplines are applicable to psychological projects, psychological research has a distinct focus and potential applications, which would benefit from the generation of a set of bespoke guidelines. These should reflect our discipline’s long standing commitment to ethical research practice, and critical stance towards the limitations of inflexible formalistic principles. This article reviews existing guidelines for visual research and provides recommendations for visual research ethics guidelines for psychology, including the importance of ‘staged’ consent, anonymity versus identification, and an expanded field of consideration which may include participants as image producers and owners; the individuals captured in the images taken by participants or researchers and the impact of the research on the eventual audiences for these images.