A Handbook of Visual Methods in Psychology

Using and Interpreting Images in Qualitative Research

Paula Reavey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351032049
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

This comprehensive volume explores the set of theoretical, methodological, ethical and analytical issues that shape the ways in which visual qualitative research is conducted in psychology. Using visual data such as film making, social media analyses, photography and model making, the book uniquely uses visual qualitative methods to broaden our understanding of experience and subjectivity.

In recent years, visual research has seen a growing emphasis on the importance of culture in experience-based qualitative methods. Featuring contributors from diverse research backgrounds including narrative psychology, personal construct theory and psychoanalysis, the book examines the potential for visual methods in psychology. In each chapter of the book, the contributors explore and address how a visual approach has contributed to existing social and psychological theory in their line of research.

The book provides up-to-date insights into combining methods to create new multi-modal methodologies, and analyses these with psychology-specific questions in mind. It covers topics such as sexuality, identity, group processes, child development, forensic psychology, race and gender, and would be the ideal companion for those studying or undertaking research in disciplines like 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 stretches 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 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 (1872/1999), 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 & 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 (Daston & Lunbeck, 2011). 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 (1860/1966) 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 & 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. Muybridge’s descriptions also proved invaluable for industrial psychology (e.g. the time-and-motion studies conducted by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth), which found them to be an inspirational ‘visual vocabulary’ for the project of restructuring and retraining the bodily movements of workers in order to maximise efficiency (Corbett, 2008).

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’ were 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 supposed 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 on to 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’.¹

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., 2013).

Social psychology has throughout its history used film and photography as a means of documenting research and shoring up the ‘face validity’ of its pronouncements. The images of participants presented in Stanley Milgram’s (2005) infamous studies on obedience in the early 1960s have long been treated as a valid demonstration of his claims, despite long-standing concerns around the rhetorical framing of these images by Milgram and his interpreters (Gibson, 2019). However, 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 (although in this case video and audio records of the experiment recently made available have led to calls for a significant re-evaluation of Zimbardo’s claims – see Reicher et al., 2018). 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 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, a 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 the history of psychology, there has been very little in the way of the development of methodologies attempting to accommodate the visual on its own terms. This is especially difficult to understand with regard 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 four decades.

Qualitative research in psychology: experience, discourse and visual myopia

During my time as an undergraduate and postgraduate student in the Northern English City of Sheffield, I was fortunate enough to be taught and supervised by a leading phenomenologist (the wonderful Peter Ashworth), discourse analysts (the super Brendan Gough and Kathy Doherty) and a leading feminist researcher in the field of health and gender (the marvellous Paula Nicolson). This methodological and theoretical plurality led to a delicious confusion and excitement for the potential of a multi-layered account of experience – an excitement that has yet to dissipate (Brown et al., 2011).

This exposure to multiplicity was formative in the development of my subsequent work on the felt quality of our experience, its narrative-discursive construction, its emplacement in the world and the political consequences of being located within particular geographical, social and cultural landscapes. For me, the issue was never about choosing qualitative over quantitative, it was how to best capture the layers of lived experience and address questions of theoretical and political relevance.

Though there remain many scholars seemingly determined to disparage qualitative research in psychology, it is now well established in its subdisciplines (critical, community, social, health, forensic, clinical, educational), even though it can still be positioned on the margins of the mainstream. At best, qualitative research slips into mainstream circles as an adjunct of ‘mixed methods’ approaches, rather than standing on its own as a mode through which the ‘psychological’ can be studied. This is due largely to its overarching focus on human meaning making, rather than the establishment of generalisable laws. Qualitative researchers continue to pursue the variety of ways in which people make and interpret meaning, make sense of and feel their way through the experiences they encounter and how they tell stories about their lives and communicate with others (Willig, 2001; Parker, 2004; Stainton Rogers & Willig, 2008; 2013). The aim of this approach is to explore the rich texture of experience and its interpretive possibilities, not only for research purposes, but in the service of social change (see Parker, 2004). The participant, and not the researcher, thus provides the focus for meaning generation and is heralded an active agent within the research process – the antithesis of an objectivist scientific approach.

In the United Kingdom, there exists a range of theoretical traditions adopted to make sense of what it means to study human meaning making and experience. Phenomenology, post-structuralism and postmodernism in particular have dominated, situating experience in first-person perspectives and/or discourse. Furthermore, atheoretical approaches are now widely adopted within mixed methods studies, where qualitative research is used as a means to describe processes of change in treatment interventions and primarily used as a means to ‘back up’ quantitative data (sometimes known as a ‘confirmatory’ approach – Creswell, 2013). Whether theoretical or atheoretical, accounts of experience are unified in locating experience at the level of the spoken word.

The take up of post-structuralism, in particular, 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 (i.e. Ken Gergen, Rom Harré and John Shotter) were deeply immersed in the work of Wittgenstein. 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 mistakenly 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 also of particular note, not least because a methodology known as ‘Foucauldian discourse analysis’ is now recognised in UK qualitative research (Willig, 2013). The method draws inspiration from The Archaeolog...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Foreword
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1. The return to experience: psychology and the visual
• PART I: Static media: the use of photography in qualitative research
• PART II: Dynamic features: social media, film and video in qualitative research
• PART III: Shared visions: opening up researcher–participant dialogues in the community and beyond
• PART IV: Ethical, analytical and methodological reflections on visual research
• Index