Visual Research in Community Psychology Notes

Lecture Objectives

  • Consider analyzing visual materials within a broader methodological mix.
  • Conceptualizing media in psychological research
  • Presenting the 5 Steps for Visual Analysis.
  • Example: A trip to the library
  • Apply 5 steps to bring order to chaos
  • General observations from the field

Procedure

  • (Engagement, selection, refinement of goals & aspirations, collaboration)
    1. Biographical interview
    2. Photo-task
    3. Photo-interview
  • Co-constructed narrative analysis
  • Dissemination & ‘outputs’

Key Features of Photo Elicitation Analysis

  • Use of Images as Stimuli
    • Photos are introduced during interviews to stimulate richer, more reflective responses.
    • They can be researcher-generated, participant-generated, or sourced from elsewhere.
  • Enhanced Communication
    • Photos help participants express feelings or ideas that may be difficult to articulate with words alone.
    • They often evoke more detailed, emotionally nuanced, and personal narratives.
  • Types of Photo Elicitation
    • Researcher-led: The researcher provides the photos.
    • Participant-led (also called “autophotography” or “photovoice”): Participants take or choose the photos themselves.
    • Collaborative: Both researcher and participant contribute images.
  • Analysis Process
    • Transcripts of interviews are analyzed for recurring themes, metaphors, and meanings.
    • Researchers interpret both the verbal and visual content—how participants talk about the photo and what it reveals about their perspectives.

Where to begin?

  • Barthes (1981) stresses the polysemic quality of images, i.e. the fact that they have many potential meanings and interpretations.
  • Relates to Walter Benjamin’s notion of the dialogical image= the meaning of a visual image is negotiated between the actual image and the reader/viewer/researcher.
  • In photo-elicitation research we want to know and confirm what the participant is intending in the production of their image, so we enter into dialogue –
    • Why did they take that image? What is the story being elicited?
  • Working with images is a creative mimetic process. Mimesis – photographs are an act of imitation or reflection of participant lifeworlds.

Library Patronage Example

  • Library patronage can normalize homeless people as citizens and challenges disruption to rights to citizenship.
  • City Councilor's view from Waikato Times article: ‘Guards sought to policy library’ indicated that homeless men are disruptive & dangerous & therefore should be excluded (classic coverage).

Library Example: Homeless people banned from a public library

  • Controversy brought to attention by men in the night shelter (Guards sought to police library, Waikato Times, 19 May, 2007).
  • Conversations occurred with homeless people, librarians, journalists & stakeholders
  • What was done?
    • Created alternative news items to bridge ‘us’ & ‘them’ framing (Shelf life: Shelter for the day, Waikato Times, 2 June, 2007)
    • Calls to exclude from library dropped
    • Broaden understandings of homelessness & used in legal cases in the USA

Why Media? Social Science Orientation

  • Media is used for communicating, maintaining social networks, accessing information, staying informed, sustaining a sense of self & place & entertainment.
  • Daily life saturated with mediated experiences!
  • Role of media in sustaining or undermining intergroup relations
  • Minoritised people are rarely given opportunities to frame their own experiences
  • Whose views are restrained & whose are ignored (symbolic power)
  • Opportunity to increase or decrease civic participation
  • Broader societal processes within which media & researchers enmeshed
  • “We need to know about each other in a way that can only involve a constant critical engagement with our media’s representation of the other” (Silverstone, 2007: 334)

Circuit of Mass Communication

  • Analysis involves collecting, organizing, describing & interpreting
  • To understand how homelessness is communicated requires engagement with 3 different levels of mass communication
    • Production (how stories emerge)
    • Representation (how news items play out)
    • Reception (how media is negotiated by audience)

Key questions for analyses include:

  • How do journalists gather information for their reports?
  • How are the efforts of media advocates, such as community service providers and researchers, interpreted by journalists and responded to in the production of news?
  • What depictions of the issue are circulated to the public?
  • What depictions are missing?
  • What do ‘ordinary’ people and those experiencing the issue think of the resulting reports?
  • What actions to address the issue are encouraged and warranted by coverage?

5 Steps for Visual Analysis

  • Identify the topic & scope of data
  • Grid, plot & defamilizarize
  • Key categories, examples & discrepancies
  • Ordering categories, linking & constructing new story
  • Interpretation & writing
    *Hodgetts & Chamberlain, 2014.

Step 1: Identify the topic & scope of data

  • Topics arise from range of sources (observations, arguments etc)
  • Research aims often remain open to refinement
  • What materials are needed to address the aims?
  • How do I get the materials? (news items, stakeholder views etc)
  • Keep research log, which becomes part of the data set
  • Tendency to talk about rather than to homeless (text) made it necessary to check claims made in news with librarian, homeless people & other patrons (audience)
  • Promote alternative perspective (production)

Trips to the Hamilton Library

  • Interactions & practices: observations, conversations, interviews, photographs & news reports
  • Working with homeless people, librarians & journalists
  • Analytic frame = ‘everyday life’
  • Local events reflect ongoing social relations & conventions significant beyond specific moments in daily life
  • Inclusion less on circumstance & more on behavior

Step 2: Grid, plot & defamilizarize

  • Take media architecture for granted / miss subtleties of form
  • Need strategies for ‘breaking texts open’
  • Simple grids establish range of items, orientate us to what is promoted, key sources, relationships etc
  • Re-orientate to what is & is not there
  • Generate additional questions
  • Figure 1 (next slide): shows key differences between the initial article relying on the views of the city councillor & the feature article

Step 2 (continued): Grid, plot & defamilizarize

  • Follows trajectory of news story
  • Initially descriptive: key developments, introduction of news sources & changes in focus
  • Grids, plot synopses & other strategies provide overview of data set, initial insights across media corpus & points of contrast
  • Playful & creative process that reflects research aims
  • Grids = shorthand index to data & particular features
  • Emerging patterns noted in research log (get ideas on paper)

Step 3: Key categories, examples & discrepancies

  • Select categories inductively & deductively, apply abductive reasoning
  • Categories can be drawn from research aims, existing literature & research log
  • Combine materials from across the data set (recontextualizing)
  • Identified characterizations of homeless men across news items, librarian association website, stakeholder accounts & photographs
  • Related categories: mediation of homeless & housed relations (estrangement), media use, library as contested civic space

Step 4: Ordering categories, linking & constructing new story

  • Combine & order elements of analysis into a logical progression of ideas that responds to research aims
  • Differs from plot synopsis (step 2)
  • Sequence of categories:
    • Section 1: newspaper-based call to exclude homeless men
    • Section 2: views of homeless men, librarians & housed patrons regarding the presence of homeless people in the public library
    • Section 3: men’s efforts at cultivating a sense of belonging, support & self through library use
    • Section 4: our efforts to challenge symbolic power

Step 5: Interpretation & writing

  • Weaving theory into our story & producing coherent argument
  • How themes work in concert to provide broader understanding
  • Increases conceptual generalization from the case (eg., Minnesota)
  • Why civic spaces important, inequities of exclusion & positive outcomes from inclusion
  • Drafting, redrafting & going back to previous steps to fill gaps
  • Several outcomes achieved – homeless people included, no security guards, 2nd article with better representation etc

Lessons from the field

  • No single strategy for this approach, but ethical relationships first
  • Think structurally about local issues
  • Value phronetic (practical wisdom) & academic knowledge
  • Work eclectically & do your homework
  • Avoid getting paralyzed by academic hair splitting
  • Develop skills in public communication
  • Sometimes it is better if someone else is up front
  • Timing is everything - seize upon unfreezing moments
  • Be flexible with plans and engagements
  • Do not be a ‘morale thief’ & develop a sense of humour
  • The aim is NOT to fix others, but to learn how to work with them