Visual Research Methods

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Predictably, photographic and media studies have based their inquiry on visual research methods, but images are also commonly incorporated into anthropological, sociological, and cultural studies projects. The inclusion of visual approaches is becoming increasingly common within certain areas of psychology, such as community and social psychology. Moreover, interdisciplinarity is informing developments of visual research differently within each discipline, partly because of the diverse theoretical approaches inherent to each field and partly because of the varying degrees of acceptance and resistance within and between areas of study.

Depending upon the researcher's interpretive philosophy, the pictures or videos could function as a form of scientific realism to produce objective evidence, or they may be used within a constructivist framework as another angle of the interpretive [Page 966]framework from which to understand the case. The vast majority of researchers using image or video operate from a postmodern critical standpoint that frames the work as a socially constructed and received praxis. Even when a researcher plans to use images to a realist purpose, to be credible this use should still be qualified with a reflexive awareness of its limits in representing truth. At some point, all imagery is produced by someone, for some purpose, and that relative standpoint must be acknowledged.

Early social scientists rejected images as too subjective to be taken seriously within a scientific positivist paradigm. Anthropologists such as Margaret Mead asserted their usage of images for an objective purpose, not tainted with subjectivity. Within social sciences, early usages of images served a realist function. The researcher asserted that the photograph represented an actual thing without further interpretive context being required. During the postmodernity turn within the social sciences theorists have articulated the multiple layers of interpretation that can be wrought from visual methodologies. The current state of the dialogue acknowledges the varying degrees of representational truth that can be ascribed to images and their production.

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