The Opportunities and Challenges of Using Photo-Elicitation in Child-Centered Constructivist Grounded Theory Research

Abstract

In the last three decades, there has been a growing interest in listening to children’s voices in child health research. Ensuring an appropriate level of dialogical engagement with children calls for participatory methods. Auto-driven photo-elicitation interviews (PEIs) are a powerful approach to obtain rich data from children. This article discusses the opportunities and challenges of using auto-driven PEIs in a health-related child-centered constructivist grounded theory study conducted in a poor-resourced country. Our experience shows that while the approach is effective for facilitating co-construction of data with children and for addressing the ethical and methodological issues associated with child-centered research in the context of a developing country, it is narrow on its own. Broadening the term to “picture-elicitation interviews” to allow for the inclusion of other forms of images would make the method more adaptable and inclusive. This would give children the flexibility of choosing pictorial options that best suit them and also help child participants and researchers address the practical and cultural challenges associated with the use of auto-driven PEI in a poor-resourced country.

Adolescent's perception of road risk on their routes to school in Makwanpur, Nepal; a qualitative study

“…Art based activities may be used to engage young people in research ( Coad, 2007 ) and PEI is commonly used with children and young people who may find it difficult to convey feelings using traditional forms of qualitative enquiry ( Byrne et al, 2016 ). It involves facilitating participants to take photographs and then use them to pictorially illustrate and describe their experiences or the issues being explored ( Darbyshire et al, 2005 ; Poku et al, 2019 ). Using photographs, this technique evokes feelings, memories and information during the course of a semi-structured interview ( Harper, 2002 ).…”

“Body as a Machine”: How Adolescents With Sickle Cell Disease Construct Their Fatigue Experiences

“…We used traditional interviews, drawings, photography, and picture-elicitation. Multi-method and art-based designs have been shown to be particularly effective in research with adolescents, empowering them and making participation in research more interesting by providing them greater flexibility in how they choose to represent their experiences, as well as allowing for different, but complementary insights into the meaning they make of their worlds (Poku et al, 2019). Thus, we allowed adolescents to decide the extent of their participation and how and what they used to communicate their experiences.…”

“…Because the picture-elicitation interviews required prior-reflection, which initiated a degree of selfinterpretations of experiences by the adolescents prior to the interviews, they generated richer narratives. In addition, the discussions of the images created deeper insights, resulting in rich data that were only accessible through the images, as well as helping to make sense of some of the data generated from the traditional interviews (Poku et al, 2019).…”

“…Arrangements were made with the clinics to provide post-interview emotional support to participants who became acutely distressed, and to manage any disclosures of harm. Power differential was managed by using visual methods to give the adolescents an active role in the research (Poku et al, 2019), adopting a less adult-centric appearance (Epstein, 1998), giving participants' choice over the interview schedule and control of interview recording (Moore et al, 2008), and adopting relationality and reciprocity (Hall & Callery, 2001).…”

Innovative methods in health information behaviour research

“…Clark, 1991;Clark-Ibáñez, 2004) there has been limited uptake in information behaviour research. Researchers might consider photo-elicitation as method for child participants (Poku et al, 2019), challenging diseases and disease disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (Danker et al, 2017), vulnerable groups (Copes et al, 2018), and to understand cultural practices (Ndione and Remy, 2018). From the medical literature topics of interest to information behaviour might be contexts of artificial nutrition and hydration for people in a permanent vegetative state (Cretin et al, 2017), lived experiences with pain (Rolbiecki et al, 2019), end-of-life care (Hajradinovic et al, 2018) and people affected by repeated self-harm (Edmondson et al, 2018).…”