ABSTRACT
Within the context of a school study, we provided more than 100 students of different age grades (9–16 years) with small digital cameras and asked them to “picture their feelings”, that is, to take some photos which show or symbolize what and who triggers emotions in them. They were given two weeks to perform this task, so that they had enough time to reflect on it. Afterwards the children and adolescents were requested to select the 15 most important photos out of their sample and were interviewed about these pictures. The method turned out to be extremely efficient. In relation to the photos symbolizing the situations, objects and persons which are key to their daily affective experiences, the students produced dense narrations about their feelings.
Within this contribution we shall (1) describe the photovoice technique and its methodological foundations in more detail; (2) outline some of the most striking results of our study; and (3) reflect on the intersection of narration and visualization, which constitutes one of the biggest challenges in analyzing and interpreting the data of this study.
