Week 14 Documents, visual methods, and other qualitative research sources and methods

1. Week 14 Documents, visual methods, and other qualitative research sources and methods Social Research Methods Alice Mah

2. “almost anything can be thought of as data.” - Seale 2004, p. 273

4. Lecture Outline • Personal and official documents • 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 activities

5. Personal and official documents

6. What are personal and official documents? • History is defined by those who write stories • And (most often) victors get to be the ones who write • Documents provide access to a world we cannot observe… but a manufactured and created view • Tend to think of written documents • But these also include audio and visual documents

7. What are personal and official documents? • Distinction between oral accounts, observations and written records • Social researchers tend to concentrate on certain categories of documents • Public records • Media reports • Private documents • Organisational records • Personal data includes: • Written records upon which historians/sociologists concentrate • But also oral information (e.g. oral or life histories; recordings are often deposited in archives/local libraries)

8. Official documents • Documents generated by the state, city, a corporation, or other ‘authority’, eg: • Administrative material created by government • Reports, discussion papers, legislation • Official statistics • Organisational documents • Patient files • Social worker case notes • Training manuals • Company reports • City Council minutes

9. Diaries and memoirs • Diaries is a generic term that includes: • Logs • Kept by a research informant • Documented evidence produced as part of self-record of activities and attitudes (eg Time use surveys) • Journals • An account kept by a researcher of a face-to-face interview • Record of respondent’s retrospective recall of activities and attitudes • Diary • An account kept by the researcher that records the research

10. Autobiographical accounts • Not produced for the purposes of research • Accounts of the famous • Accounts of the powerful • Accounts of ‘ordinary lives’ • Make visible the lives of the previously silenced • Those whom historically have been ignored or marginalised • But, majority from middle and upper class perspectives (Burgess, 1993: 91)

11. Media Sources • Newspapers • Newspaper archives: http://www.bl.uk/collections/newspapers.html) • Magazines • Internet (see Hamman -reading 43- in Seale reader, and online ethnography slides) • TV • Film (many accessible through film archives; Warwick Library also has a collection) • BFI's National Film and Television Archive • Imperial War Museum Film and Video Archive • Scottish Screen Archive • National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales • 8 English regional film archives

12. Archives • National, state, local, interest group/ institutional archives • Texts, images, audio and video recordings, including a range of official and personal documents Limitations of archival documents: • Snapshots of time; purpose/ intent • Elites/ non-elites • Global north/ south • Questions re: truth and objectivity • Re: digital/virtual archives in particular: lack of context; digital exclusion; loss of “materiality” as data

13. Selected list of archives • http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ • http://www.theherbert.org/index.php/home/history-centre/history-centre-collections • http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/mrc • http://parlipapers.chadwyck.co.uk/marketing/index.jsp • http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/Corporation/LGNL_Services/Leisure_and_culture/Records_and_archives/ • http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/indiaofficeselect/welcome.asp • http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/thewomenslibrary/ • http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/?gclid=COLNu_DLiKECFSaElAodgFRpNw • http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/ • http://www.imagesofempire.com/bin/empire.dll/go?a=disp&t=home-loader.html&_max=0&_maxlb=0&si= • http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/search?adv=y

14. Analysis of documentary material • May (1993) suggests analysis needs to consider • Authenticity • Representativeness • Credibility • Meaning • Look at the context in which the document is produced (eg socio-cultural context) • Further discussion on analysis in weeks 14 and 15…

15. visual methods

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. 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

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

20. Clark-Ibáñez: photo-elicitation images

21. Clark-Ibáñez: photo-elicitation images

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

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

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

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

26. Spatial methods

27. Spatial Methods • ‘Spatial’ methods: Particularly useful for investigating relationships between people, images, places and objects (meanings, understandings) and for gaining deeper qualitative insights • Examples of places/spaces: communities, cities, neighbourhoods, homes, public spaces, parks, rural spaces, natural spaces, confined places, policed places, streets • Material culture studies (Daniel Miller- see course extracts) 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 • Research example: Diary-photo diary-interview method (Latham), time-space diagram, diary, photo and interview as complementary

28. 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 antecedents: Walter Benjamin’s flaneur and George Simmel’s Metropolis and Mental Life, 1903; ‘founded’ by Guy Debord 1955, contemporary example: Ian Sinclair’s London Orbital). • Criticisms: spectator/voyeuristic/detached/popular.

29. Research example: Industrial Ruination, Community, and Place (Mah 2012) • See in particular chapter 5 ‘Reading landscapes of ruination, deprivation, and decline,’ pp. 129-152 • Outlines social and spatial analysis approach of ‘reading’ social and spatial landscapes of industrial and urban decline • Combines visual, spatial, mobile, and ethnographic methods

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

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

32. Conclusions • There are a number of possibilities for collecting qualitative data… depending on your research question(s)… be creative! • Further possibilities: • using the senses more widely in social research (smell, sound…) • using video and social media • collaborative (co-produced) research • combining qualitative methods

33. Seminars • This week: bring a short video, document, image, or object for analysis, practical exercises and discussions in small groups. • Readings: first two short readings in the Seale reader, plus journal article by Pink! • For next week: download NVivo to your laptops and bring to seminars! Available on: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/its/servicessupport/software/nvivo