Participatory Visual and Digital Methods by Aline Gubrium and Krista Harper

Participatory Visual and Digital Methods by Aline Gubrium and Krista Harper
In recent years, there has been a call for qualitative researchers to consider adding participatory
research methods to their methodology toolbox. By participatory I mean conducting research
where all of the individuals involved are active participants in designing the research project and
in carrying out, analyzing and writing about the research data. In this way the participants are
not subjects to be studied but co-investigators, co-analyzers and co-writers. The important aspect
of using these methods is that participants are given voice and input into projects that often have
direct implications for them and their extended community.
Engaging in participatory research is a bit more complicated in that as a researcher you are
engaging in others as a co-researcher and the very nature of that relationship requires one to
pause and consider a number of questions. As a qualitative researcher, I have traditionally used
ethnographic techniques of participant observation and informal interviewing to conduct my
research; albeit my work has primarily been with classroom teachers and young children around
gender and science in elementary classrooms. These methods have served me well in
understanding the meaning students make of “doing science and doing gender”; however, I have
often thought about how to make my research more accessible to the teachers and the children I
work with. To what extent should I be including them in my research and how would that impact
what I am observing and noticing? Upon more reflection, I noticed that in my graduate classes
with teachers I did use more participatory approaches such as having them create collages and
asking them to write narratives to accompany their images and then presenting and sharing them
with each other. I found that broadening my methods allowed me more insight into the
participants’ thoughts and meanings and my research became richer and fuller as a result.
Together we gained insight into the lives of being a classroom teacher.

It wasn’t until I read the book Participatory Visual and Digital Methods by Aline Gubrium and
Krista Harper that I really began to understand and see the full potential of participatory research.
The introductory chapters of this book explain the theory underlying the methodology. Then
each chapter systematically covers the specifics of each kind of participatory research; Photo-
Voice, Digital Storytelling, Film and Video, GIS, and Digital Archives and Exhibitions. What I
found very helpful is that each of these content chapters follows a consistent layout: the authors
introduce the method to us and then use examples called core stories to give us concrete models
of how other researchers have used these particular methods effectively. For example, in one
core story about Photo Voice, the authors describe the work of Claudia Mitchell. Mitchell was
asked by UNICEF to run a project on school violence. She decided that she would try a
participatory method like Photo Voice and gave the students cameras and asked them to
document where in the school they felt safe and strong and where they did not ( p.75). She then
interviewed the children about their pictures and states, “the rest was history.” The approach she
used not only allowed the students to tell the researcher what they knew from their lived
experience but Mitchell became sold on Photo Voice as a method as a means to advocate for
policy change, in this case, school violence.
I found these core stories to be very helpful in not only thinking about methods that were new to
me such as Participatory GIS, but also in helping me to see how each of these approaches lent
themselves to particular research goals and questions. Besides the chapters that deal with specific
examples of participatory methods and their valuable core stories, I found that there were two
chapters the authors included that were particularly helpful; the chapter on ethics and the chapter
on writing up your research. As I mentioned previously, using participatory methods raises new
questions for qualitative researchers. What about the power dynamics? The relationships we
build with our co-investigators can be fraught with tension. And what about the IRB and the
issue of confidentiality when you are researching in a community where everyone knows each
other by name? These are the dilemmas of doing this kind of research and these are the things
that need to be both acknowledged and dealt with before the first field note is written or the first
interview is conducted.
The chapter on ethics is arranged by ethical moments and is capped off with a core story. There
are helpful suggestions about how to create and manage an ethics training session or how to
think about confidentiality. The authors draw from the work of Patricia Hill Collins (1998) in
explaining that in participatory research wisdom and knowledge are not separate entities with
one designated as academic (wisdom) and the other to folklore (knowledge). In participatory
research they are equal in their attempt to understand phenomena well.
The final chapter is perhaps to me the most important and that is the dilemma around co-
analyzing and co-writing the results of the research. I know that some researchers have chosen to
separate out the writing tasks (e.g. the students write from their point of view and the researcher
from theirs) while others have tried to combine the writing. In this chapter, the authors challenge
us as researchers to really think through what it means to have participants co-design, co-
investigate, co-analyze the data and co-write the findings. Should participants and researchers
write separate findings from their own point of view as some have suggested and done? These
are crucial questions to ponder and wrestle with and I applaud the authors for prompting the
discussion. I highly recommend this book to all qualitative researchers in that it helps us to
explore new methods and by including the chapters on ethics and writing, ethnographers can
now feel fully equipped to handle the difficult aspects of thinking through whether participatory
research is right for them and their project.

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Participatory Visual and Digital Methods by Aline Gubrium and Krista Harper

research methods to their methodology toolbox. By participatory I mean conducting research

direct implications for them and their extended community.

ethnographic techniques of participant observation and informal interviewing to conduct my

Together we gained insight into the lives of being a classroom teacher.

policy change, in this case, school violence.

research they are equal in their attempt to understand phenomena well.

research is right for them and their project.

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