Portraiture

Context

Portraitists view human experience as being framed and shaped by the setting. The context of a portrait is the setting—or where data collection happens. The context takes into account the physical, geographic, temporal, historical, cultural, and aesthetic nature of the research site, participants, and their experience. The context becomes the reference point to place people and action in time and space and as a resource for understanding what they do and say.

The internal context is the physical setting. In portraiture methodology, personal context, or the place and the stance of the researcher, are made clear. [Page 645]A historical context considers the origins and evolutions of each participant.

Voice

In portraiture research, the researcher's voice is evident throughout the research—as witness, as interpretation, as preoccupation, as autobiography, as discerning others or listening for the voices of other identities or feelings, and as voice in dialogue through interviewing and having informal conversations with participants.

The researcher may use voice as witness to express the outsider's stance, to look across patterns of action and see the whole picture or portrait. In this way, the researcher is acquiring knowledge about her or his participants, but as a witness to the experience being captured and from a position on the boundary.

Voice as interpretation underscores the role of the portraitist for this is where she or he makes sense of the data. In making an interpretation, the portraitist must be vigilant about providing enough descriptive evidence in the text so that the reader might be able to offer a different interpretation of the data. Thick description contributes to authenticity by providing enough description so that readers will be able to determine how closely their situations match and can be generalized to the research situation. Using multiple data sources, repeated observations, and interviews provides the qualitative researcher with rich data for making the interpretative voice evident.

Voice not only seeks to witness the participant's stance through new eyes, but also it is used as preoccupation, or the ways in which the researcher sees and records reality. This concept of voice could also be viewed as the personal context or the researcher's perspective of the story, as it reflects the researcher's disciplinary background, theoretical perspectives, intellectual interests, and understanding of relevant literature.

Voice as autobiography also reflects the life story of the portraitist. In this sense, the researcher's perspectives, questions, and insights are inevitably shaped by her or his own developmental and autobiographical experiences. The researcher uses these experiences as resources for understanding and as sources of connection and identification to participants.

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