ABSTRACT
The approach taken in this book has been one which seeks to encourage and develop personal research practice, embracing a reflexive yet critical empiricism. The focus has been on visual research as an interpretive craft which understands meaning as the result of complex construction and mediation. Rather than enumerating instances and attempting to generalise to larger populations, the type of research highlighted here has focused on small-scale case studies and detailed ‘thick descriptions’ derived from visual narratives of individuals, groups, relationships and events. It has also been suggested that the ‘craft’ of visual research requires a balance between inductive forces – allowing the collected data to speak for itself, and deductive forces – structuring, ordering principles derived from theoretical models and concepts.
