Visual, Narrative and Creative Research Methods

Application, reflection and ethics

Dawn Mannay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317688419
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

Visual research methods are quickly becoming key topics of interest and are now widely recognised as having the potential to evoke emphatic understanding of the ways in which other people experience their worlds. Visual, Narrative and Creative Research Methods examines the practices and value of these visual approaches as a qualitative tool in the field of social science and related disciplines.

This book is concerned with the process of applying visual methods as a tool of inquiry from design, to production, to analysis and dissemination. Drawing on research projects which reflect real world situations, you will be methodically guided through the research process in detail, enabling you to examine and understand the practices and value of visual, narrative and creative approaches as effective qualitative tools.

Key topics include:

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• techniques of data production, including collage, mapping, drawing and photographs;

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• the practicalities of application;

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• the positioning of the researcher;

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• interpretation of visual data;

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• images and narratives in public spaces;

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• evaluative analysis of creative approaches.

Visual, Narrative and Creative Research Methods will be an invaluable companion for researchers, postgraduate students and other academics with an interest in visual and creative methods and qualitative research.

1 INTRODUCTION

DOI: 10.4324/9781315775760-1

Visual, Narrative and Creative Research Methods: Application, Reflection and Ethics examines the practices and value of visual approaches as a qualitative tool in the field of social science and related disciplines. The book is centred on the use of visual approaches but the use of narrative and creative in the title are symbolic of the commitment to embed the visual within wider frames, rather than isolating visual studies as somehow existing as a separate entity. The visual images that we study are often surrounded by the existing narrative of an accompanying print press story, the images that we produce form part of a wider narrative that directs their framing, and when we ask participants to create something visual, our understanding of these images is often predicated not just on the image itself but the accompanying elicitation interview.

Visual researchers have worked hard to overcome a pervasive textual bias and the argument that the social sciences are ‘a discipline of words’ (Mead 1995) in which there is no room for pictures, except as peripheral, supporting illustrations. This work has been recognised and in contemporary social science research there has been an appreciation of the value of visual approaches; where the visual is often positioned as ‘an immediate and authentic form, which verbal accounts are unable to fully encompass’ (Spencer 2011, p. 32). However, although we are now living in an ‘ocularcentric’ culture (Mitchell 1994), where images form a vital part of our everyday worlds, we need to be careful not to focus so much on the visual as to suggest that the social sciences become ‘a discipline of pictures’. The visual has to be embedded in the narratives of its inception, reception, interpretation and impact.

In the same way, there needs to be an appreciation of creativity. The creation of the visual image itself can be linked with originality, imagination and inspiration, which all form the components of the concept of creativity. However, beyond their making, images themselves are constantly subject to interpretation and re-interpretation. Images never ‘contain a singular or true meaning’ (Hall 1997) and all readings employ forms of creative analysis. In disseminating visual images, ideas of creativity also hold importance, as emergent forms of dissemination often explore spaces beyond the forceful limitations of traditional academic outputs. Additionally, much creative work is undertaken to achieve projects of social justice by engaging with the emotions of audiences. These creative forms of dissemination and engagement are sometimes enabled with images; but they also rely on narrative accounts, theatre and poems, where, ethically or practically, images cannot be shared or widely circulated.

Audiences and aims

This book has been written with a wide readership in mind. The text aims to provide an advanced but accessible guide that takes the reader through every aspect of the research process, drawing on planning, ethics, implementations and reflections. It will be a useful framework for students in the later years of social science degrees and postgraduate students, as well as a support for lecturers and researchers with an interest in visual and creative methods; and qualitative research more generally. The term social sciences is seen as an umbrella term for anthropology, sociology, psychology, education and cultural studies; however, this disciplinary positioning does not intend to exclude those working in human geography, health sciences, media studies or the humanities.

It is a book for anyone with an interest in qualitative research methods and their application in academia but also in the projects undertaken by researchers in government agencies, the third sector and other organisations. Later in this chapter, as is common practice, I offer a concise overview of the organisation of the volume for ease of reference and for readers to select their own starting points; for although each chapter links across the volume to build a coherent picture of theoretical, methodological and ethical concerns, each chapter has been written so that it can also stand alone as a source of information for researchers and practitioners, or as a set reading for students with interests in particular facets of visual studies.

In writing this book, I was influenced by my own research journey but equally by my teaching both in relation to teaching third year undergraduate students and facilitating workshops. I have organised and led a number of visual methods workshops, both nationally and internationally, and the diverse audiences have informed the content of the following chapters. These workshops have been embedded in summer schools, attached to Continuing Professional Development events, linked to wider training programmes on qualitative research methods or as standalone activities focusing on particular visual techniques. At all of these workshops, I have learnt new things from my audience and, importantly, gained an insight into ‘what visual researchers want to know more about’. These are often issues that have been particularly difficult to access, or gain a comprehensive knowledge about, in their studies of the visual.

I am not claiming that the book is a panacea for all questions about the visual or that it can provide an account that is comprehensive enough to attend to ‘what visual researchers want’ in its entirety. There will always be new questions and challenges. However, I have been responsive to a widespread interest in moving beyond the gloss of the visual, to present an account of ‘the good, the bad and the ugly’ of doing research on the ground. I have considered the need for coverage of the highly practical questions about the everyday negotiation of fieldwork; and a reflection on both situated ethics and the complex and controversial landscape of dissemination, representation and visibility, which questions what we ‘do’ and ‘should do’ with visual outputs. Additionally, I have been receptive to researchers’, and students’, desire to explore the interpretation of images and the social power relations that are implicit in who is seen, how they are seen and who is viewing; appreciating that images are never ‘innocent’ (Rose 2001).

In this way, the book aims to engage with issues of theory, methodology, ethics and dissemination to explore the opportunities and challenges, which shape how qualitative visual research is conducted in a multidisciplinary context. There are, of course, many visual approaches, only some of which are addressed in this book, but all of the approaches discussed consider the relationship between the creative, the visual, and the narrative; combining both verbal, textual and visual data in an integrated way. Here I draw on my own work and collaborations with colleagues, embedding these discussions in reference to the studies of other researchers who work in similar modes of visual research. There is an emphasis on creative, handcrafted methods such as drawing, mapping, collaging and sandboxing, as well as an interest in working with personal artefacts and temporal narratives. There is also a focus on static media (Reavey 2011) in relation to the use of existing photographic images and their creation in the techniques of photo-elicitation and photovoice. The following section will provide the reader with a sense of my background, which will clarify ‘the gravitational centres around which my thinking on research methods revolves’ (Banks 2001, x).

A visual journey

My own interest in the visual as a tool of qualitative inquiry was ignited by a moment of serendipity, not only in relation to the accidental nature of something unexpected, but importantly also the space to draw novel connections and synthesise insights (Fine and Deegan 1996). I had taken a short, twenty-week course at an adult learning centre called ‘Basic Counselling Part 2’ and as a homework activity we had been asked to make a collage about ourselves to share with others in the class. My collage was very much a representation of the mundane aspects of everyday life, such as housework, and also hobbies, likes and dislikes. However, in the sharing of the collages some of the other students had embraced the task in a different and deeper way, picturing absent fathers and key transitions, junctures and significant events in their life course. Nonetheless, each collage, whether superficial or highly reflexive, acted to tell a different story about the self, one that had not necessarily been engendered in the purely verbal class activities or the informal chatting of the coffee breaks. The visual had achieved something richer and more distinctive.

This chance encounter with the visual introduced me to the power of the visual to generate different accounts, to act as a tool to fight familiarity and engender defamiliarisation (Mannay 2010). It also made me reflect on the ethics of creative techniques. Later as I completed a first degree based in Education and Psychology and a Masters degree in Social Science Research Methods, I remembered this experience of the visual and embedded it in my Master's dissertation, which acted very much as a space to explore, work with and evaluate techniques of visual data production (see Mannay 2008, 2010). For me, this dissertation study reinforced the value of visual approaches and these were again centralised, along with the use of creative narrative work, in my doctoral study Mothers and Daughters on the Margins: Gender, Generation and Education (Mannay 2012).

This study explored the intergenerational marginalisation of working-class mothers and their daughters both in terms of education, employment and family relationships; examining social reproduction, and the ways in which gender, place and class act as barriers to educational progression for the participants, and the psychological, physical and practical costs of social mobility (Mannay 2013a). The specific techniques that I employed in this study were mapping, collaging, photovoice and ‘possible selves’ narratives.

The mapping technique was not a geographically accurate representation of home, rather one that encouraged participants to represent their localised worlds as they imagine them to be through drawings. These participant-directed maps were then used as tools of elicitation as participants talked me through their hand-drawn illustrations to communicate their understandings of home and the surrounding neighbourhood. The collaging and photovoice techniques were presented in the same way and participants could select the mode, or modes, that they wanted to work with from these options, although one chose to be interviewed without taking part in any visual data production. Collages were constructed from everyday objects, magazines, photographs and printed online images, while the photovoice activity was facilitated with disposable cameras.

These techniques engendered in-depth interviews where an understanding of participants’ everyday lives was communicated with their visual creations; but to move beyond the everyday and focus on participants’ past lives and imagined futures, I also introduced the concept of ‘possible selves’. Initially, I was drawn to the work of Markus and Nurius (1986, p. 954) who attempt to provide a conceptual link between cognition and motivation by exploring individuals’ possible selves; their ‘ideas of what they might become, what they would like to become, and what they are afraid of becoming’. However, their quantitative design offered forced choices presented in questionnaires, which limited participants’ responses to the categories offered by the researchers. Accordingly, I developed an approach more compatible with my aims; one that asked participants to create narrative or visual forms to represent their ‘possible selves’ (Mannay 2014), which again formed the basis for elicitation interviews.

The successes and points of contention from the Mothers and Daughters on the Margins project, discussed in detail in the following chapters, informed my further engagement with creative qualitative inquiry. For example, the project, University Challenge (Mannay and Edwards 2013) employed the innovative technique of sandboxing, where participants created sand scenes using objects and miniature figures to represent their educational journeys. I return to this in Chapter 5. More recently, my work with Dr Aimee Grant and Ruby Marzella (2014), explored in Chapter 6, has drawn on participants’ everyday artefacts to explore their experiences of breastfeeding and new motherhood; and in a different project, Negotiating Young Parenthood, we introduced found images as a photo-elicitation tool.

Therefore, although I have been involved in other forms of data production (for example, see Mannay and Wilcock 2015), overall visual, narrative and creative approaches have remained central in my research work. Additionally, these approaches are embedded in my undergraduate teaching and workshop facilitation, where students and delegates do not simply listen to me talk about the visual but actively create and analyse images in relation to formative and summative assessments and workshop activities. In this way, I am thoroughly located in the visual and the creative; however, this location does not blind me to the problematic nature of visual research, its interpretation and its dissemination. The book aims to draw on these experiences in a critical manner that considers the potentialities, ambiguities and challenges in the field.

Structure of the book

The book is divided into seven further chapters, which work through different lenses to explore visual, narrative and creative research methods. The following chapter, Chapter 2, ‘Mapping images: charting the visual ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of figures
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Mapping images: Charting the visual and creative in social science research
• 3 Making the familiar strange: Questions we would not think to ask
• 4 Participatory methodologies: Questions of power and positionality in creative research
• 5 Problematising interpretation: Applying auteur theory, disrupting the surface and breaking the frame
• 6 Visual and narrative data production: Time, artistic ability and incongruence
• 7 Ethical concerns: Answers to questions we did not want to ask
• 8 Conclusion: Looking back and moving forward
• Index