ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |19 pages

Introduction

chapter 1|19 pages

The return to experience

Psychology and the visual

part I|94 pages

Static media

chapter 2|13 pages

Image and imagination

chapter 3|16 pages

Bend it like Beckham?

The challenges of reading gender and visual culture

chapter 5|14 pages

Narrating biographical disruption and repair

Exploring the place of absent images in women’s experiences of cancer and chemotherapy

chapter 7|20 pages

Reflections on a photo-production study

Practical, analytic and epistemic issues

part II|123 pages

Dynamic features

chapter 10|21 pages

The video-camera as a cultural object

The presence of (an)other

chapter 11|15 pages

Girls on film

Video diaries as ‘autoethnographies’

chapter 12|19 pages

Visual identities

Choreographies of gaze, body movement and speech and ‘ways of knowing’ in mother–midwife interaction

chapter 14|17 pages

The big picture

Using visual methods to explore online photo sharing and gender in digital space

part III|227 pages

Shared visions

chapter 15|18 pages

Visualising mental health with an LGBT community group

Method, process, (affect) theory

chapter 16|24 pages

Imagery and association in a group-based method

The visual matrix

chapter 17|22 pages

Working with group-level data in phenomenological research

A modified visual matrix method *

chapter 18|18 pages

Risk communication and participatory research

‘Fuzzy-felt’, visual games and group discussion of complex issues

chapter 19|17 pages

Picturing the field

Social action research, psychoanalytic theory, and documentary filmmaking

chapter 21|18 pages

Building visual worlds

Maps as a tool for exploring located experience

chapter 22|15 pages

Towards a visual social psychology of identity and representation

Photographing the self, weaving the family in a multicultural British community

chapter 23|19 pages

‘I didn’t know that I could feel this relaxed in my body’

Using visual methods to research bisexual people’s embodied experiences of subjectivity and space

chapter 24|13 pages

Travelling along ‘rivers of experience’

Personal construct psychology and visual metaphors in research

chapter 25|13 pages

Psychogeography and the study of social environments

Extending visual methodological research in psychology

chapter 26|16 pages

Tribal gatherings

Using art to disseminate research on club culture

chapter 27|14 pages

Sometimes all the lights go out in my head

Creating Blackout, the multi-sensory immersive experience of bipolar II

part IV|103 pages

Ethical, analytical and methodological reflections on visual research

chapter 29|17 pages

Image-based methodology in social psychology in Brazil

Perspectives and possibilities

chapter 31|19 pages

Polytextual thematic analysis for visual data

Analysing visual images

chapter 32|17 pages

‘So you think we’ve moved, changed, the representation got more what?’

Methodological and analytical reflections on visual (photo-elicitation) methods used in the men-as-fathers study