1. Week 8: Visual and Spatial Methods
Social Research Methods
Alice Mah

2. Lecture Outline Visual sociology and visual methods
Focus: photo-elicitation interview method (including participant photography)
Visual, spatial and mobile methods
Focus: walking methods / ‘psychogeography’ (researching relationships between people & place)
Conclusions
Seminar: readings and homework

3. Visual sociology
‘Seeing comes before words… and establishes our place in the surrounding world.’ (John Berger, 1977, Ways of Seeing, p. 7)
Visual material is a central to the social realm, not simply a way we can study. We cannot understand social life without considering the visual aspects of social life.
Brief history of visual methods: 19th-20th century: photo-journalists and documentary photographers, use of film and photography in social anthropology, social investigators and social reformers as photographers; visual sociology established in 1980s, developed in the 1990s, and is now increasingly popular (digital age).
Visual methodologies produce rich data, are open to a range of interpretations, and can provide insights into producers of visual material, consumers of visual material, and social contexts of image production and consumption.

4. Visual methods Three types of visual methods (Banks, 2001):
making visual representations (studying society by producing images)
examining pre-existing visual representations (studying images for information about society)
collaborating with social actors in the production of visual representations
Different types of visual material
two-dimensional pictures- drawings, maps, diagrams and charts, photographs, paintings, etc.
moving or electronic images, for example TV, video and film, websites
material objects themselves, such as toys, homes, streets, signs
Visual methods can be used as stand-alone methods or as complementary with other qualitative methods such as interviews and participant observation.

5. Focus: photo-elicitation interviews
Photo-elicitation interviews: researchers introduce photographs into the interview context
Photographs may be researcher-produced, existing photographs, or produced by research participants
Three main uses of photographs (Harper, 2002):
As visual inventories of people, objects and artefacts
As depictions of events that are part of collective or institutional paths (photographs of schools or events)
As intimate dimensions of the social (photos of family, friends, the self, the body)
Advantages: ease rapport, provide structure, prompt questions, richer data, greater balance of power dynamics
Challenges: confidentiality, ethics, trust, technical skill, sensitivity to context, power relations
Photo-elicitation interviews were first introduced in 1967 by anthropologist John Collier.

6. Example of photo-elicitation ‘auto-driven’ interview instructions, Clark-Ibáñez

7. Clark-Ibáñez: photo-elicitation images

8. Clark-Ibáñez: photo-elicitation images

9. Byrne and Doyle: photo-elicitation with focus groups, using existing mining images

10. Byrne and Doyle: photo-elicitation with focus groups, using existing mining images

11. Les Back: participant street photography, Brick Lane, East London

12. Les Back: participant street photography, Brick Lane, East London

13. Visual and Spatial Methods
‘Spatial’ visual methods: concerned with relationships between people and places/spaces (communities, cities, neighbourhoods, homes, public spaces, parks, rural spaces, natural spaces, confined places, policed places, political places)
Diary-photo diary-interview method (Latham), time-space diagram, diary, photo and interview as complementary
Material culture studies (Miller) people’s relationships with objects, photos, materials
Site observations (drawing maps, photographing areas of research; spatial part of ethnographic lens)
Mobile methods: researching while on the move (participant and/or researcher), conducive to spatial research

14. Focus: walking methods and psychogeography
‘Walking whilst talking’ (or driving or on public transport): research participants guide researchers through places: city streets, neighbourhoods, shops, churches, parks, and talk about meanings, memories and ideas related to places. Informal, good for rapport, multi-sensory, rich material.
Psychogeography: researchers explore the social and psychological impacts of places on people; primary method through researcher walking and observing. Earlier antedecents: Walter Benjamin’s flaneur and George Simmel’s Metropolis and Mental Life, 1903; ‘founded’ by Guy Debord 1955, contemporary example: Ian Sinclairs’s London Orbital). Criticisms: spectator/voyeuristic/detached/popular.

15. Driving tours with research participant in Ivanovo, Russia: Mah

16. Driving tour with research participant (taxi driver) in Walker, Newcastle: Mah

17. Conclusions
Visual, spatial and mobile methods capture multi-dimensional, rich data
Particularly useful for investigating relationships between people, images, places and objects (meanings, understandings) and for gaining deeper qualitative insights
Specific ethical issues of confidentiality, trust and power relations
Further possibilities: using the senses more widely in social research (smell, sound…)

18. Seminar Readings
Büscher and Urry: very useful overview of the development of mobile methods
Miller: come prepared to discuss this text in detail in seminars, about the relationships between people and objects (further context including book review available on module website)
Latham: an interesting approach, the diary-photo diary-interview method, which combines aspects of visual, spatial and mobile methods.

19. Seminar Homework
1) Conduct a social/spatial observation while ‘on the move’: on public transport, driving a car or walking (for ‘mobile methods’ ideas, read Büscher and Urry, Anderson, Moles or Sinclair on the reading list). Bring fields notes and digital photographs (if possible) for seminar discussion. OR
2) Conduct a photo-elicitation interview (see Bolten et al and Clark-Ibanez on reading list, also Byrne and Doyle in Chapter 9 of Picturing the Social Landscape, eds. Knowles and Sweetman). Bring copies of the photos and notes/transcript of the interview for seminar discussion.