Photographs in Qualitative Research

Research Participants as Photographers

Photographs have an important role in broadening the researcher's understanding of research participants' lives outside the research context. Many research situations, for example, focus groups and in-depth interviews, while invaluable forums for gathering research data are necessarily artificial because researchers are taking people out of their normal context. It is therefore, useful to develop means of capturing data in a real-life situation and to supplement data gathered from structured research. Asking participants to carry out a specified task before the research session, for instance, serves two purposes. It sensitizes them to the topic to be discussed and it enables them to capture some aspects of their worlds that they can bring into the research situation to be examined and that the researcher can retain and incorporate into the analysis and research findings.

Photographs are often ideal as a preinterview (or postinterivew) task. Participants can be given disposable or digital cameras and instructed to take photographs that are relevant to the project. Instructions can be as broad as, “Please take photographs of anything that is important in your life” or they can be quite specific, for example, “Please take photographs of all the pairs of shoes that you own, photographing each pair separately” or “Take pictures of store fascias that you find particularly attractive or unattractive.” Participants are asked—and paid—to have the photographs developed or to downloaded or print them so that they are available in the follow-up research session. Participants then talk through the photos—this talk may trigger conversation involving other participants—explaining why they are relevant, what their importance is, and how they link to the topic that is being researched.

This discussion with the researcher or with the whole group is an essential part of the research process because it enables the participant to explain the context of the photos and to give his or her personal interpretation of their importance. There is a danger with photographs, as with all visual data, that they can be seen as self-explanatory, especially as they are often visually very powerful. However, photographs are a primary source of data that offers the potential to gain insights that are not accessible through interview methods, and they need analysis and interpretation as researchers would do with verbal data. This is not to say that photographs cannot have a secondary role of “bringing the consumer to life” in a subsequent client presentation, but treating this function as their primary role undersells the potential of these data.

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