Week 8: Visual and Spatial Methods

Social Research MethodsAlice Mah

Lecture OutlineVisual sociology and visual methods

Focus: photo-elicitation interview method (including participant photography)

Visual, spatial and mobile methods Focus: walking methods / ‘psychogeography’

(researching relationships between people & place)ConclusionsSeminar: readings and homework

‘Seeing comes before words… and establishes our place in the surrounding world.’ (John Berger, 1977, Ways of Seeing, p. 7)

Visual material is a central to the social realm, not simply a way we can study. We cannot understand social life without considering the visual aspects of social life.

Brief history of visual methods: 19th-20th century: photo-journalists and documentary photographers, use of film and photography in social anthropology, social investigators and social reformers as photographers; visual sociology established in 1980s, developed in the 1990s, and is now increasingly popular (digital age).

Visual methodologies produce rich data, are open to a range of interpretations, and can provide insights into producers of visual material, consumers of visual material, and social contexts of image production and consumption.

Visual sociology

Visual methods Three types of visual methods (Banks, 2001):

1. making visual representations (studying society by producing images)

2. examining pre-existing visual representations (studying images for information about society)

3. collaborating with social actors in the production of visual representations

Different types of visual material two-dimensional pictures- drawings, maps, diagrams and charts,

photographs, paintings, etc. moving or electronic images, for example TV, video and film, websites material objects themselves, such as toys, homes, streets, signs

Visual methods can be used as stand-alone methods or as complementary with other qualitative methods such as interviews and participant observation.

Focus: photo-elicitation interviewsPhoto-elicitation interviews: researchers introduce

photographs into the interview context Photographs may be researcher-produced, existing

photographs, or produced by research participantsThree main uses of photographs (Harper, 2002):1. As visual inventories of people, objects and artefacts2. As depictions of events that are part of collective or institutional paths

(photographs of schools or events)3. As intimate dimensions of the social (photos of family, friends, the self,

the body)Advantages: ease rapport, provide structure, prompt

questions, richer data, greater balance of power dynamicsChallenges: confidentiality, ethics, trust, technical skill,

sensitivity to context, power relations

Example of photo-elicitation ‘auto-driven’ interview instructions, Clark-Ibáñez

Clark-Ibáñez: photo-elicitation images

Clark-Ibáñez: photo-elicitation images

Byrne and Doyle: photo-elicitation with focus groups, using existing mining images

Byrne and Doyle: photo-elicitation with focus groups, using existing mining images

Les Back: participant street photography, Brick Lane, East London

Les Back: participant street photography, Brick Lane, East London

Visual and Spatial Methods

‘Spatial’ visual methods: concerned with relationships between people and places/spaces (communities, cities, neighbourhoods, homes, public spaces, parks, rural spaces, natural spaces, confined places, policed places, political places)

Diary-photo diary-interview method (Latham), time-space diagram, diary, photo and interview as complementary

Material culture studies (Miller) people’s relationships with objects, photos, materials

Site observations (drawing maps, photographing areas of research; spatial part of ethnographic lens)

Mobile methods: researching while on the move (participant and/or researcher), conducive to spatial research

Focus: walking methods and psychogeography ‘Walking whilst talking’ (or driving or on public transport):

research participants guide researchers through places: city streets, neighbourhoods, shops, churches, parks, and talk about meanings, memories and ideas related to places. Informal, good for rapport, multi-sensory, rich material.

Psychogeography: researchers explore the social and psychological impacts of places on people; primary method through researcher walking and observing. Earlier antedecents: Walter Benjamin’s flaneur and George Simmel’s Metropolis and Mental Life, 1903; ‘founded’ by Guy Debord 1955, contemporary example: Ian Sinclairs’s London Orbital). Criticisms: spectator/voyeuristic/detached/popular.

Driving tours with research participant in Ivanovo, Russia: Mah

Driving tour with research participant (taxi driver) in Walker, Newcastle: Mah

Conclusions

Visual, spatial and mobile methods capture multi-dimensional, rich data

Particularly useful for investigating relationships between people, images, places and objects (meanings, understandings) and for gaining deeper qualitative insights

Specific ethical issues of confidentiality, trust and power relations

Further possibilities: using the senses more widely in social research (smell, sound…)

Seminar Readings

Büscher and Urry: very useful overview of the development of mobile methods

Miller: come prepared to discuss this text in detail in seminars, about the relationships between people and objects (further context including book review available on module website)

Latham: an interesting approach, the diary-photo diary-interview method, which combines aspects of visual, spatial and mobile methods.

Seminar Homework

1) Conduct a social/spatial observation while ‘on the move’: on public transport, driving a car or walking (for ‘mobile methods’ ideas, read Büscher and Urry, Anderson, Moles or Sinclair on the reading list). Bring fields notes and digital photographs (if possible) for seminar discussion.

OR2) Conduct a photo-elicitation interview (see Bolten et

al and Clark-Ibanez on reading list, also Byrne and Doyle in Chapter 9 of Picturing the Social Landscape, eds. Knowles and Sweetman). Bring copies of the photos and notes/transcript of the interview for seminar discussion.