Visual Methods in Psychology

Using and Interpreting Images in Qualitative Research

Paula Reavey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136812569
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This comprehensive volume provides an unprecedented illustration of the potential for visual methods in psychology. Each chapter explores the set of theoretical, methodological, as well as ethical and analytical issues that shape the ways in which visual qualitative research is conducted in psychology. Using a variety of forms of visual data, including photography, documentary film-making, drawing, internet media, model makingand collages, each author endeavors to broaden the scope for understanding experience and subjectivity, using visual qualitative methods.

The contributors to this volume work within a variety of traditions including narrative psychology, personal construct theory, discursive psychology and conversation analysis, phenomenology and psychoanalysis. Each addresses how a particular visual approach has contributed to existing social and psychological theory in their topic area, and clearly outline how they carried out their specific research project. The contributors draw on qualitative sources of verbal data, such as spoken interview, diaries and naturalistic conversation alongside their use of visual material.

This book provides a unique insight into the potential for combining methods in order to create new multi-modal methodologies, and it presents and analyses these with psychology specific questions in mind. The range of topics covered includes sexuality, identity, group processes, child development, forensic psychology, race, and gender, making this volume a vital contribution to psychology, sociology and gender studies.

1 The Return to Experience

Psychology and the Visual

Paula Reavey

The Visual has Always been there: An (In)Visible History of Continuity in Psychology?

Psychology has a long-standing concern with the visual and with technologies of visualisation. This goes way beyond the specialised subdiscipline of the psychology of perception; it is instead part of the conceptual roots of the discipline as a whole. The emerging visual technology of photography was after all a central part of how the nascent discipline of psychology established its scientific credibility in the late nineteenth century – through the visual recording of scientific observation. For example, in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin made comparisons across photographs and illustrations of children and animals as the evidential base for his theory of universal emotional expressions. This approach greatly influenced the growth of Comparative Psychology in the late nineteenth century (Richards, 2002). Moreover, photographs and minute observations of his son William Erasmus Darwin, which Darwin and his wife collected as a ‘developmental diary’ from his birth, are arguably the template from which Developmental Psychology established itself (Fitzpatrick and Bringmann, 1997).

The use of visual records to differentiate species and meticulously categorise plants and animals into various types and subtypes became the hallmark of nineteenth-century natural science. It marked the systematisation of observation, indicating accuracy, evidential recording, and careful attention to detail. What is measurable, therefore, is assumed to be what is observable. In the case of psychology, the fledgling discipline sought to separate itself from philosophy, and the myriad metaphysical difficulties which appeared to prohibit a ‘science of mind’, by emulating the natural sciences such as functional physiology as far as possible (Richards, 2002). Recent successes at that time in physiology had arisen from mapping functional connections between anatomy and behaviour. This same logic was applied to what Gustav Fechner (1860) called ‘an exact theory of the functional relationships between body and soul and between the bodily, mental, somatic and physiological world’ (cited in Meischner-Metge and Meischner, 1997: 102).

Two technologies of visualisation made this Functional Psychology possible. The first of these was the development of time-measuring devices such as the kymograph and chronoscope. This made it possible to record the time taken for the perception of stimuli and the execution of a response. Careful manipulation of stimuli under controlled laboratory conditions along with precise recording of the timing of responses became the basis of psychological experimentation (see Danziger, 1990). The second, and no less important, was the use of ‘graphic notation’ and ‘chronophotography’ by Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge to study the behaviour of animals and subsequently humans (see Rabinbach, 1992). Chronophotography is a process of taking rapid exposures (around a dozen per second) on either a single photographic plate or on a series of cameras. The aesthetically striking images which result – such as Muybridge’s famous photographs of galloping horses – provide a detailed visual description of the body’s movement in space over time. This impressive oeuvre clearly anticipated moving film and the culture of viewing more generally. And yet, Muybridge’s descriptions proved invaluable also for Industrial Psychology (e.g. the time and motion studies conducted by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth) which aimed to restructure and retrain the bodily movements of workers in order to maximise efficiency.

Photography also greatly influenced the development of Psychopathology and Clinical Psychology. Visual categorisation of different personality types and the categorisation of the ‘mad’, ‘subnormal’ or ‘criminal’ was performed by assembling photographic arrays in which purported mental differences could be made legible to the ‘trained eye’ (Jackson, 1995). Photographs were also commonly used to lend visual credibility to diagnostic categories of mental defects or ‘feeblemindedness’. Through careful visual recording, the spaces between a person’s eyes, the size of a forehead or the body posture of an asylum inmate could provide direct evidence for an observable and thus categorical difference in the person under study from a ‘typical’ person. The multiple exposure technique used by Marey – where a series of images are exposed on the same photographic plate – was also used by Francis Galton (see Draaisma, 2000). Galton argued that his ‘compound photographs’ of criminals and of ‘consumptives’ taken one-by-one onto the same photographic plate showed their common features, since individual or non-common features would be effectively washed out during the process. The technique was, Galton claimed, a sort of ‘pictorial statistics’ where norms of human development and diversity could be visually represented. This idea fed into popular notions of normality and abnormality around mental health which gained currency in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Porter, 2003). Visual techniques such as the Rorschach ink blot tests – surely one of the most recognisable representations of psychology – and the Thematic Apperception Test (see Cramer, 1996) were and still are used to provide insight into a person’s personality type, his/her unconscious motivational state, or used to detect signs of mental illness. Finally, contemporary forms of visualising the differences between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ individuals are now reported to be ‘captured’ in the magnetic resonance techniques commonly used in psychiatry, behavioural genetics and neuro-psychology. However, the dangerous over-interpretation of these visual markers – that they represent enduring and static biological markers of diseases and brain dysfunction – should be approached with extreme caution (Bentall, 2009; Cromby, et al., forthcoming).

Social Psychology has throughout its history used film and photography as a means of documenting research and shoring up the ‘face validity’ of its claims. The images of participants presented in Stanley Milgram’s (2005) infamous studies on obedience in the early 1960s appear to leave little room for doubting the validity of his claims. Close analyses of the statistical evidence (and the ecological validity of the experimental set-up) about the tendency for ‘ordinary’ people to follow orders that can lead to the harming of others is somewhat overshadowed by these powerful images. Similarly the video recordings taken by Philip Zimbardo and colleagues of the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE), have been promoted as powerful testimony to the ease with which people take on the aggressive or passive behaviour in their respective roles as prisoner or guard. This material was captured using the sort of ‘hidden camera’ techniques that have become the mainstay of reality-TV shows such as Candid Camera, or more recently, Big Brother. Interestingly Zimbardo himself has claimed that Alan Funt, creator of the first reality-TV show Candid Camera, was ‘one of the most creative, intuitive social psychologists on the planet’ (Zimbardo et al., 2000: 197). Kurt Lewin also used hidden camera techniques to make a series of films which focused on the spaces of child development, the best known being the 1931 film The Child and the World. This film work led to a meeting with the Russian auteur Sergei Eisenstein (director of Russian classics including Battleship Potemkin and October) and subsequent plans for a psychological laboratory to be established in Moscow in collaboration with the local state film academy (Lück, 1997: 285). To summarise, an historical analysis of the role of the visual within psychology can reveal its instrumental effects in providing the context for ‘the psychological’ to become observable and, therefore, measurable and more ‘scientific’. In using visual images as evidence, and in employing visual technologies to increase the accuracy and thus the status of psychological observations, the discipline of psychology has also made its findings more publicly accessible. And yet, despite these noteworthy uses of visual images throughout psychology, there has been very little in the way of methodologies that have attempted to accommodate the visual. This is especially difficult to understand with regards to qualitative methodologies that claim to capture more readily meaning making in everyday experience. To understand why this is so, it is necessary to review briefly the emergence of qualitative research in psychology to grasp why it is that everyday experience has been in the grip of language-based methodologies for the past three decades.

Qualitative Research in Psychology and Visual Myopia

Qualitative research is now well established in certain subdisciplines of psychology (critical, community, social, clinical, educational), even though as a methodology it continues to sit on the margins of psychology’s mainstream. Rather than searching for generalisable laws (which is psychology’s ultimate aim), qualitative researchers are concerned with uncovering the variety of ways in which people make and interpret meaning, how they tell stories about their lives and communicate with others (Willig, 2001; Parker, 2004; Stainton Rogers and Willig, 2008). Thus, the aim of this type of approach is to explore in depth the rich texture of people’s accounts and conversations, for the purpose of research only or to work towards radical social change (see Parker, 2004). The participant, and not the researcher, becomes the focus of meaning generation and active agent. In recent years, numerous publications have emerged that describe in detail how to collect, store and analyse qualitative data in a systematic and logical fashion, depending on the theoretical tradition one is working from.

In the United Kingdom, qualitative psychology has been informed by theoretical traditions such as post-structuralism and postmodernism, and to a lesser extent phenomenology and existentialism. However, it is noteworthy that the take up of post-structuralism has been somewhat esoteric and has tended to promote the linguistic and the discursive above other modalities (e.g. visual, sound, affect). There are a number of reasons underpinning this. First of all, Anglo-North American critical social science has been greatly influenced by ordinary language philosophy (e.g. Wittgenstein, Austin, Ryle) and the development of linguistically oriented ‘phenomenological sociology’ in the form of ethnomethodology. It is notable, for example that three of the major figures in Anglo critical psychology of the 1970s and 80s were deeply immersed in the work of Wittgenstein (i.e., the works of Ken Gergen, Rom Harre and John Shotter). Second, the reception of the semiotic tradition in the UK has tended to focus on a narrowly linguistic reading of De Saussure rather than the huge variety of other forms of semiotics which deal with other modalities of understanding and expression – such as C. S. Peirce’s pragmatist semiotics, A. J. Greimas’s comparative/structuralist semiotics, Thomas Sebeok’s zoosemiotics/biosemiotics and Felix Guattari’s schizoanalytic semiotics. Finally, key post-structuralist authors such as Derrida and Foucault have been read as discourse theorists. Derrida’s (1976) phrase ‘there is nothing outside the text’ (p. 158) has been itself read outside of the text as a claim that there is no intelligibility outside of discourse, when in fact it is a highly nuanced technical point about the hermeneutics (interpretation) of philosophical discourse and the metaphysics of graphism (writing in a very broad sense).

The treatment of Foucault is of particular note, not least because a methodology known as ‘Foucauldian Discourse Analysis’ is now recognised in UK social psychology. The method draws inspiration from The Archaeology of Knowledge, where Foucault makes the claim that ‘discourse constructs the objects of which it speaks’ (Foucault, 1972/2008: 54). As with Derrida, this very playful claim is made as part of a broader set of arguments, in this case with the history of ideas and Frege’s philosophy of language. Moreover, the book, along with the lecture The Discourse on Language from the same period, make it abundantly clear that at this time Foucault was concerned explicitly with the relationship between the discursive and the ‘extra-discursive’. This concern came to full fruition in Foucault’s subsequent investigations of the relationship of knowledge and power, where the visual plays a central role in terms of the organisation of bodies (i.e. panopticism) and the representation of the population in terms which enable its management as a productive and reproductive force (i.e. biopolitics). To selectively read Foucault as a discourse theorist is then to miss the richness and subtlety of his thinking for psychology (for a ‘non-discursive’ reading of Foucault and psychology, see Brown and Stenner, 2009).

The majority of qualitative work uses spoken semi-structured and unstructured interview data, natural conversations, focus group discussions, diaries or written reports, which all focus on either the broad sense-making patterns, or the minute detail of the way in which the language is structured and performed in social interactions. What every technique shares in common, however, is a reliance on the spoken or written word as a source of data – a fundamentally mono-modal approach.

Elsewhere, Katherine Johnson and I (Reavey and Johnson, 2008) have argued that the reason for the reluctance to engage in multi-modal forms of qualitative analysis is related to visual data being more ambiguous or polysemic (multiple meanings) – as the interpretation of the image cannot always be fixed and does not always relate to any spoken account by the participant (see also Frith and Harcourt, 2007 and Motzkau, this volume). Despite this reluctance among some qualitative researchers, the visual has grown significantly in the social sciences and more recently in psychology. In the section that follows, some of the topics that researchers in psychology have examined using visual approaches will briefly be explored, in order to illustrate how the rich embodied and spatial (amongst others) texture of experience cannot be fully captured by language-based/mono-modal perspectives.

Why Qualitative Psychology could Use Visual Approaches: The Potential for Multi-Modal Approaches

To date, visual approaches in psychology have tackled a range of experiential issues, including embodiment (Del Busso, 2009; Gillies et al., 2005), health and illness (Radley and Taylor, 2003a, 2003b; Radley, 2009), the process of remembering (Middleton and Edwards, 1990; Radley, 1990; Middleton and Brown, 2005; Brookfield, Brown and Reavey, 2008), identity and appearance (Gleeson and Frith, 2006) and mental health difficulties (Silver and Reavey, 2010, in press). This multi-modal work has combined visual and verbal data to create a richer picture of the topic under study and has used a variety of visual techniques, from the use of already existing images (e.g. in the form of family photographs, here referred to as photo-elicitation) to the use of images generated within the context of the research, here referred to as photo-production¹ (participant-generated photos, photo-diaries, paintings and drawings). What these authors share is the acknowledgement that (a) individuals experience the world not only through narrative, but through setting (space) and embodiment and (b) that individuals are already using multi-modal forms of expression and communication when (re)presenting their experiences in everyday life. As people become more proficient in using new communication technologies to convey ideas and feelings and engage in new forms of social interaction, relationality and subjectivity, it is ever more vital that researchers in psychology engage with these everyday forms of communication and representation.

How we use and interpret the visual in research, of course, is in turn informed by the kinds of questions we wish to ask and the theoretical frameworks that inform those questions. A number of researchers in this volume have used visual techniques in a variety of ways to address complex issues relating to the study of experience. By outlining how visual methods are used to address particular experiential issues throughout the volume, we can begin to see their utility in taking the study of experience beyond textual representations and into the realm of multi-modality. We will also see how researchers have begun to open up a space to examine ‘hard to reach’ issues, such as the environmental spaces that individuals experientially in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. The Return to Experience: Psychology and the Visual
• Part I: Static Media: The Use of Photography in Qualitative Research
• Part II: Moveable Features: Using Facebook and Video in Qualitative Research
• Part III: Shared Visions: Opening Up Researcher-Participant Dialogues in the Community and Beyond
• Part IV: Ethical and Methodological Reflections on Visual Research
• Index