Photography has often been considered tainted as a source of research data, even in tourism, its natural habitat. This situation is undoubtedly a legacy of the prejudice that many social scientists held toward the use of visual data when the academic study of tourism took off in the 1970s and 1980s. Tourism research has therefore persistently favoured textual data over visual data. This paper argues that the power of photography to prove and move can be harnessed to bridge this theoretical and practical cognitive gap. Issues relating to the performance of photography, including those of timing and intent, as well as the speed of information exchange, need however to be considered when designing and implementing research using photographic data. This implies a need to review the 'circle of representation' of tourism destination images, as well as to divide participant-generated image methods into two strands: found photographs and commissioned photographs.
The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in Journal of Mixed Methods Research, Vol. 10(4): 335-351, October 2016, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1558689815581561, first published online 13 April 2015, published by SAGE Publishing. ?? The Author(s) 2015This article makes a systematic review of the use of participant-generated image methods in social science research. Such methods have a long history of application across the social sciences. Their development has, however, been uneven and fragmented, resulting in a lack of gestalt (wholeness or unity). This has led to the methods being underappreciated and sometimes mistrusted. The article compares and contrasts the design, implementation, and analytical methods of nearly 300 studies. Six main groups or traditions are identified. However, the study finds no strong evidence that any is distinctive enough to warrant being awarded its own name. Meanwhile, no convincing evidence is found to suggest that best practice has either been identified or adopted
Tourism planning is widely considered to be a highly political process, particularly when tourism is only one of a number of possible land uses and there are numerous stakeholders, with a diversity of interests, all trying to influence the outcome. The winners are typically those holding power, while the losers are often the destination community, who lack sufficient power to influence planning decisions. New tools are therefore needed to empower wider stakeholder participation in the tourism planning process, and volunteer-employed photography (VEP) appears a promising option. This paper discusses the use of VEP to inform tourism planning on St David's Peninsula in Wales. As part of a National Park, the area attracts a large tourist numbers and is subject to relatively strict planning regulations, resulting in many land-use conflicts. Volunteers from two stakeholder groups -local residents and tourists -were given cameras and photo diaries, and asked to use it to comment on what they do and do not appreciate about the area, existing planning problems and ways to avoid future planning problems. Through this case study, the paper will examine the appropriateness of VEP as a tool for assisting tourism planning. The major finding is that a richer, deeper and more valuable dataset can be generated through the participation of host communities and visitors using the VEP approach. As a means of visually representing participants' views, VEP can be a powerful data collection and analysis tool, making a significant addition to the tourism planning toolkit at the local level.
This article defines and discusses the strengths and limitations of volunteer-employed photography (VEP). VEP is one of a range of participatory research techniques which focus particularly on the visual dimension of a person's experience, be it of the place where they live or somewhere they are visiting, of a special event or of their daily routine. Three pilot surveys were undertaken in St. David's Peninsula in Great Britain in July and August 2006 on a random sample of ten tourists. Findings and literature review show that VEP has considerable potential as a tool for examining planning issues. According to the literature, as well as the experience of the researcher, there are indeed some evident drawbacks in using VEP. However, VEP also has clear strengths.
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