ABSTRACT
Within the social sciences generally, and qualitative psychology specifically, realisation is growing of the value of working with data in different media, for giving researchers access to different modalities of meaning. Equally important is the coincidence of visual and technological literacy with the promotion of a more reflexive, perspectival understanding of the principles and practices of knowledge generation. Visual methods have been described as the ‘oldest new methods in qualitative research’ but, whilst photographs have been a central aspect of some sociologists’ work for decades, visual research methods have experienced a sudden surge in popularity. Photo-elicitation is a multimodal technique for studying what people see in, and say about, pictures. It provides ways of combining the visual and verbal by using pre-existing, researcher- or participant-generated images, encouraging their careful and creative viewing by study participants, and eliciting extensive, verbalised responses to their symbolic qualities.
