Using Visual Data in Qualitative Research

Marcus Banks, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781473913196, 9781473913189
• eBook ISBN: 9781526426109
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book helps students and scholars get started on the exciting journey of using visual data in social research. It covers the many uses a researcher can make of images, from creating images as a part of the research process to collecting and analyzing images from diverse sources.  Exploring the opportunities and arming readers with tools to overcome some of the practical challenges, Using Visual Data in Qualitative Research is a perfect guide to uncovering new and unexpected dimensions of social life.

Chapter One Introduction

Contents

• Why (not) pictures? 4
• Being visual 5
• Planning and executing a visual research project 8
• Key terms and concepts 12
• Organization of this book 18
• Images in the book 19

Chapter objectives

After reading this chapter, you should:

• see why the use and study of images in social research as one among various methodologies employed is justified;
• see the distinction between image creation and image study;
• understand the place of visual methodologies in the research process;
• know about some key terms and concepts; and
• have an overview of the book.

Case Study 1 Visual methods and hypothesis testing

For visual anthropologists, as well as many other visual studies scholars, Sol Worth and John Adair’s ‘Through Navajo Eyes’ project of the late 1960s is one of the landmarks in visual research. Although there have been criticisms of the project, it stands out as an example of well-designed empirical research, with clear objectives and methodologies. Worth (a communications scholar and anthropologist) and Adair (an anthropologist and linguist) set out to see if people who had little or no exposure to cinema and moving images would make films that reflected the way they saw the world in general. In particular, would the Navajo – a Native American group living in Arizona – be able to ‘bypass’ language in communicating their world-view through film. The premise for the investigation rests on what is known as the Whorf–Sapir hypothesis – the idea that the structure of the language one speaks conditions how one sees and understands the world around one. Speakers of very different and unrelated languages, English and Navajo for example, will, in Whorf’s words, ‘cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances’ in very different ways (Whorf, 1956, p. 214). While there had been various attempts to test the hypothesis, up to this point these mostly relied on language itself to conduct and assess the investigation in a rather circular fashion. Worth and Adair’s breakthrough was to identify and use another channel of communication.

Adair and Worth’s student Dick Chalfen gave 16 mm film cameras to seven Navajo people, living in a relatively traditional community in Arizona, where many older people spoke only Navajo, although the filmmakers were all bilingual. The seven had all seen some films but only one of them (an artist) had seen many. On the other hand, none of them was what Worth and Adair call ‘professional Navajo’ (1972, pp. 72–3), in the sense that they were self-consciously aware of Navajo traditions and customs and used to representing them to others. After they had been given basic instruction in shooting and editing, the Navajo were free to film whatever they wanted. Their final films consisted of short, silent, documentaries on topics such as silversmithing, weaving and Navajo curing ceremonies.

Figure 1.1 Alta Kahn shooting Navajo Weaver II

The results broadly confirm a ‘weak’ version of the hypothesis: language is a guide to social reality, not determinative of it. In assessing the way in which the Navajo filmmakers edited sequences of action, Worth and Adair noted on the one hand that the filmmakers did not discover and adopt the principle of continuity cutting common to Western film traditions (i.e. they saw ‘jump cuts’ as unproblematic), while on the other hand, certain sequences of apparently over-long or pointless action (such as a weaver winding up an entire skein of wool into a ball) could be linked to particular Navajo ideas about ‘action’ that are themselves linguistically distinctive in the Navajo language. Although the findings of the ‘Navajo eyes’ project are not wholly conclusive (some films, for example, could not be ‘read’ by some Navajo viewers, and tellingly one informant said she could not understand one film because it was ‘in English’; in fact the films were all silent), it is nonetheless a pioneering early use of visual methods to address a particular research question. The original 1972 monograph describing the project was revised 25 years later by Dick Chalfen, who summarizes much of the subsequent debate (Worth and Adair, 1997).

Why (not) pictures?

Why should a social researcher¹ wish to incorporate the analysis of images – paintings, photographs, film, video, drawings, diagrams and a host of other images – into their research? There are two good reasons, though the first is easier to prove than the second, and there is also one caveat.

The first good reason is that images are ubiquitous in society, and because of this some consideration of visual representation can potentially be included in all studies of society. No matter how tightly or narrowly focused a research project is, at some level all social research says something about society in general, and given the ubiquity of images, their consideration must at some level form part of the analysis. Of course, the same could be said of music, or clothing, or many other aspects of human social experience. Yet while many valuable studies of these phenomena exist, none seems to have assumed the sensory prominence within social research that images have, sound (in the form of language) perhaps excepted. Some suggestions as to how this has come about are presented in the next chapter.

The second good reason why the social researcher might wish to incorporate the analysis of images is that a study of images or one that incorporates images in the creation or collection of data might be able to reveal some sociological insight that is not accessible by any other means. While this is self-evidently true of research projects that focus on visual media, such as a study of the effects of television viewing on children, it is less self-evidently true – and much harder to prove – in other projects. It is relatively easy to triumph the findings of some piece of visual research (some examples are given in later chapters), but less easy to prove that the same insights could not have been generated by an alternative research methodology. One would have to set up a series of research investigations into the same topic, with the same research subjects, each identical but for the research method employed, and each using researchers who were unaware of the findings of the other teams. While this might be possible in a laboratory context for a set of psychological experiments, say, the number of variables would spin out of control when attempted in a field setting. I return to this issue in the book’s conclusion, but until then I confine myself to describing the distinctiveness of visual research processes and their findings rather than making claims as to their uniqueness.

The difficulty of setting up the experimental conditions to test one research methodology against another leads me to the caveat. Regardless of the existence of books and manuals such as this, devoted to a single social research methodology, in practice social researchers employ a number of different methodologies in their investigations, ranging from the highly formalized (certain types of image content analysis, closed interviewing schedules containing internal consistency checks) to the highly informal (chatting to people, observing daily activity). To restrict oneself to a single methodology or area of investigation is as sociologically limiting as wilfully ignoring a methodology or area. This book is an attempt to make the case that visual research methodologies are distinctive, are valuable, and should be considered by the social researcher whatever their project. It is not an attempt to claim that these methodologies supplant all others. Visual research should be seen as only one methodological technique among many to be employed by social researchers, more appropriate in some contexts, less so in others.

Being visual

Case study 2 Understanding photography through the eyes of children

The previous case study was largely about the content of the films the Navajo people shot, and it inspired many subsequent studies. However, Worth and Adair were largely unconcerned with what the Navajo filmmakers themselves thought about image-making.

Many sociologists and anthropologists have experimented with giving cameras (still or moving) to research subjects in order to ‘see’ the world as their research subjects see it. Although there are problems with this method, usually involving the interpretation of the resulting images, as in the Navajo case, it can be particularly useful when conducting research with people who might find it difficult to express themselves verbally in the context of a formal interview – those with learning difficulties, for example, or children who might otherwise become bored. The findings sometimes also give further insight into the sociology of image-making practices.

Sharples et al. (2003) set out to explore not so much what children ‘see’ as how children understand photography in the first place. Disposable cameras were given to 180 children in five countries across Europe, drawn from three age groups (7, 11 and 15 years old). The children were given a weekend to photograph whatever they liked and were then interviewed about their pictures. Some of the findings might have been expected; for example, the youngest children tended to photograph toys and other possessions, while the oldest children showed a preference for groups of friends. Equally, younger children enjoyed their photographs largely for their content alone, while older children had a growing appreciation of style and composition. But the researchers also conclude that the children’s photographs are not merely their ‘view of the world’ but an indication of their perceived place in the world, particularly with regard to kinship and friendship relations. One finding was that children were generally ‘scathing’ of adult photography, and saw their parents’ use of photography as indicative of their adult power.

In another study, Mizen (2005) gave 50 children cheap cameras and asked them to compile a ‘photo-diary’ of their work experience. This formed one element of an investigation into children’s employment in England and Wales (between the ages of 13 and 16 children may legally be employed in what is known as ‘light work’, which does not affect their schooling or health). The cameras were introduced roughly halfway through a year-long period of qualitative research, during which the children had already been keeping written diaries, having interviews with research staff, and so on. One of the aims of the project, and one that particularly justified the use of cameras, was to find out ‘what the children had to tell us about their work [rather] than the usual preoccupation of researchers with what the work has to tell us about the children’ (Mizen, 2005, p. 125). Unsurprisingly, given that the children were themselves the photographers, there were few images of children actually working, and indeed very few pictures of people at all (including employers and co-workers). What the images did show was the character of the children’s work, through documentation of their workplaces.

Mizen points out that there are no studies that have directly observed children at work in the ‘affluent economies of the North’ and so the photographs allow him and his co-researchers direct access to the structure, form and content of the work, but more particularly to the children’s engagement with it. In particular, Mizen claims that although only around 5% of the photographs showed employers, they were an invisible presence (in several instances they had asked the children to cease taking photographs) and relations with employers became a research theme that was subsequently developed with the children in interviews. Thus although both Sharples et al. and Mizen had quite different research agendas and employed quite different forms of subsequent analysis (Sharples et al. used two kinds of quite formalist analysis: see Chapter 3), the use of the same visual methodology produced rather similar findings concerning power relationships between children and adults.

What precisely are visual methodologies? While this question is addressed in detail in the rest of this book, particularly in Chapter 4, which considers methods in a fieldwork context, some basic points need to be established early on. Broadly speaking, there are two main strands to visual research in the social sciences. The first revolves around the creation of images by the social researcher (typically photographs, film and video but also drawings and diagrams) to document or subsequently analyze aspects of social life and soci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Sidebar List
• Illustration List
• Editorial introduction
• About this book and its second edition
• Chapter One Introduction
• Chapter Two The place of visual data in social research A brief history
• Chapter Three Approaches to studying the visual
• Chapter Four Visual methods and field research
• Chapter Five Presenting visual research
• Chapter Six Conclusion Images and social research
• Glossary
• References
• Index