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Visual Research

Qualitative research focuses most readily on spoken and written words. This preoccupation with the complexity of language was evoked by Alan Peshkin, who described the task of the qualitative researcher as “making words fly.” In contrast, visual research focuses on nonlinguistic images. Pictures may be used as a source of data, as a method of data analysis, and as a means of data representation. There are multiple research methodologies for conceptualizing such work. Ultimately, the methods for the analytic use of nonlinguistic visual data can have implications for all qualitative researchers, even those who do not seek to incorporate visual images in their studies.

Philosophical Antecedents

Historically, visual images have been regarded as unreliable. Plato argued that all visual images are essentially lies—pale imitations of a reality they seek to reference. Images were not trustworthy, and the individuals who trafficked in them were dangerous frauds. During the 17th-century scientific revolution, René Descartes reinforced this classical distrust of the visual by arguing that sight, or any other perceptual sense, is deceptive.

This prejudice in Western thought against the visual began to change during the Enlightenment—first through the work of the British empiricists and then, during the mid-18th century, with the introduction of the new philosophical discipline of aesthetics. Derived from the Greek verb for perceive (and the grammatical rules that govern its conjugation), aesthetics suggests a form of mediated understanding with neither viewer nor object controlling the conditions for knowing.

Although this initial concept of aesthetics was soon supplanted by interest in discriminations of preference and judgment, understanding the visual as a form of mediated understanding continued. During the 20th century, this line of inquiry could be seen in Martin Heidegger's and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological works, which contributed to the interpretive turn in postmodernism that encouraged audiences to derive multiple readings from a single text.

Methodological Approaches toward the Visual

There is a spectrum of methodological approaches to the use of the visual in qualitative research. At one end of the spectrum, which may be called objective, is the use of images as a form of data collection. At this point on the continuum, photographic images, or ethnographic films, are considered to be objective renderings of reality. Analysis of these images, through language, reveals layers of semiotic meanings. At the other end of the spectrum, which may be called generative, are images that are created by the researcher through the process of data collection and analysis. These images may be autonomous and require no further explication through language. A midpoint on this spectrum may be called formative, which applies strategies for reading latent images to lived experience. This view argues that perception inherently requires framing and focusing. Thus, our experience of objective reality is always constrained by conscious or unconscious schematic filters.

A researcher may incorporate multiple positions from this spectrum and combine aspects of the objective, formative, and generative within a single piece of research. Therefore, it is important that the researcher declare how the visual is used in the process of inquiry. If differing visual methodological approaches are incorporated, then the researcher must either decide to communicate clearly to the readers when and why these shifts are occurring or decide that the struggle to sift between these changing perspectives is a task that the readers must undergo to experience and mediate the research.

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