Elicitation Methods in Qualitative Research — Transcript

Overview of elicitation methods in qualitative research, focusing on photo and object elicitation, their uses, benefits, and ethical considerations.

Key Takeaways

Elicitation methods enrich qualitative interviews by prompting deeper participant narratives.
Photo elicitation is the most commonly used elicitation method.
Elicitation tools can be diverse and adapted to the research context, including virtual representations.
Qualitative research values the situated nature of knowledge and the interactional context of interviews.
Ethical considerations are important when using elicitation methods.

Summary

Introduction to elicitation methods within qualitative research interviews.
Elicitation methods help draw out narratives and experiences that may not emerge in standard interviews.
Focus on two main elicitation methods: photo elicitation and object elicitation.
Qualitative interviews view knowledge as situated and contextual, emphasizing participant meanings and experiences.
Interviews are dialogical and informal, allowing participants to share what is meaningful to them.
Elicitation tools can be physical or virtual, including photos, objects, drawings, videos, music, and memorabilia.
Using elicitation tools can lead to richer, nuanced data and emergent insights.
The interaction and context of the interview, including researcher-participant dynamics, influence data.
Practical tips and ethical issues related to elicitation methods are discussed.
Examples primarily drawn from health research to ensure relevance to the audience.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

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Welcome everybody. Thank you so much for joining this webinar today on elicitation methods in qualitative research that's given by Professor Vanessa May. I am Tarani Chandola. I'm the director of the Methods Hub at the University of Hong Kong, and this is the

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second seminar in our seminar series that we just started. The Methods Hub aims to be the key point of contact for social science research methods at the University of Hong Kong, aiming to bring together experts in the university and elsewhere

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in Hong Kong for training and resources in research methods. Professor Vanessa May is a professor of sociology at the University of Manchester, and she's also the co-director of the Morgan Center for Research into Everyday Lives. She was previously the editor-in-chief

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of the journal Sociology, and that's the flagship journal of the British Sociological Association. She has written extensively about the self, belonging, temporality, aging, family relationships, and qualitative methods using a range of mixed methods, qualitative interviewing, narrative analysis, and biographical

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methods. Today she'll be talking to us about elicitation methods and qualitative research interviews with a particular focus on photo elicitation and object elicitation, exploring why qualitative researchers might choose to use elicitation methods and what the aims of such methods are.

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She'll be speaking for about 45 minutes, and she'll take questions after her talk. Please type your questions into the Q&A box in Zoom, and I will read them out to her afterwards. Thank you so much for doing the seminar,

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Vanessa, and please start whenever you're ready.

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Okay, thank you, Tarani. Let me just share my screen. I'll share my slides first before I forget, and there we go. So thank you, Tarani, and I

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have to say that when Tarani said that I was the co-editor-in-chief of Sociology, you forgot to mention that we were co-editors-in-chief of that journal for a while.

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So I look back fondly on those years that we edited the journal. So thank you to Tarani for the invitation,

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and this is a lovely opportunity for me to hopefully then in the Q&A session have some kind of dialogue

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with the audience and get some impressions from the audience as well as to how you think about elicitation methods and maybe also if people have used them, what they've been particularly good for,

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aspects that I've not maybe covered in this talk. So I've been asked to do a fairly general overview of elicitation methods, and also I was saying earlier to Tarani, because it was Tarani inviting me to do this talk, I've kept most of my examples

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so most of my examples come from health research, and luckily Tarani and Mary did say that a lot of the audience members come from various health research disciplines, so hopefully this will feel relevant to the audience

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as well. So in terms of what I'll cover today,

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I'll first do a sort of a general introduction of what elicitation methods are and why we might use them, and then I'll give a more detailed

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a more detailed account of two types of elicitation methods, and these are, well, at least the first one, photo elicitation, is the most commonly used elicitation method of all the elicitation methods, and then the second one I'll talk about is object

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elicitation, and then I'll end with some sort of practical tips and also I'll be talking a bit about the ethical issues

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in using these methods. So first, just a sort of a general

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talking a bit generally about elicitation methods, what they are and why we might do them,

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and then these are sort of aspects, characteristics of elicitation methods that sort of cut across or tend to cut across the different elicitation methods.

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So first of all, elicitation methods fall under the sort of general heading of qualitative interviews, so we'll use elicitation methods most commonly within a qualitative interview context, and a few of the kind of key characteristics of qualitative

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interviews that also feed into why we might want to use elicitation methods

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are first of all that within qualitative research knowledge is viewed as situated and contextual, so that is why it's important to talk to people

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about their lives and try to understand how a social phenomenon will appear different, it will behave in a different way in slightly different contexts, for example for different groups of people, and this is also then why we are

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generally interested in qualitative research. We're interested in finding out how our research participants, how they interpret their lifeworld, and we're interested in the meanings that they assign to their experiences, and generally also we'll use qualitative interviews when we feel that there's

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something, there's an element of people's experience or social reality that we can't directly observe, that we need to talk to people to understand something.

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And qualitative interviews usually take the form of a dialogue, so they are sort of dialogical. The aim is often to get

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away from a more question-and-answer format, which is a bit more formal, but rather to sort of

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run the interviews in a way where our research participants get the opportunity to tell us what's meaningful

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to them. So the interaction in the interviews is usually an important part of the data as well, and often qualitative researchers will take some of that interaction into their analysis. Again, this is related to that point about knowledge being situated and

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contextual, so the knowledge that is created within an interview context, we need to take that context into account. So, for example, we need to take into account

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the types of questions that we've asked our interview participants and

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also maybe the extent to which we might have had rapport, what the relationship between us and the research participant would be. So, for example, if it's a woman interviewing a man or a man interviewing a man, that the

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interaction will be slightly different, so the gendered nature of the interaction will be slightly different. And qualitative interviews tend to be quite informal, so like I said, we tend to try and steer away from the formal question-and-answer type interview,

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and usually we'll have some kind of theme or topic at least that we go into the interview with as researchers, but the aim of qualitative interviews is to offer flexibility, offer room for participants to tell us what they find

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significant. So qualitative interviews can often

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be surprising and lead to this kind of emergent data

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that sort of comes from our research participants' experiences, so they can tell us things that we as researchers maybe couldn't

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even anticipate to be relevant.

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And qualitative interviews tend, one of the core aims of qualitative interviewing is to capture nuanced and rich data about the social world. So elicitation methods then, they are a

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particular type of qualitative interview where we use an elicitation tool, and that elicitation tool can be a range of things. It can be a photograph, it can be an object as we'll discuss today, it can be a—we can ask people to draw

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things, for example, to draw a relational map. People have used video clips, music, and so on, clothing, memorabilia, so elicitation tools can be a whole range of things. So we use these elicitation tools

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in the interview as a way of drawing out narratives, as a way of getting people to talk about their experiences in ways that they wouldn't necessarily in a

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standard interview. So the clue is sort of in the name, so

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the elicitation tool is used as a way of eliciting talk,

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and sometimes the object or the photograph, for example, isn't necessarily there to hand, so it might be an object or a photograph that's been destroyed. So that's what I

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mean by the thing or the photograph, the elicitation tool can be conjured up virtually as well, and elicitation tools can be used eit—

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wants to see so those of you who've conducted qualitative research will know that research participants generally tend to want to be helpful and tend to want to give us what they think we as researchers need and so this this um

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this is also the case with elicitation tools um so sometimes they might pick objects or photographs because they think these will be ones that we're interested in rather than ones that they're that are particularly significant in in their

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lives and then the the interview situation is less formal than than even a standard interview so uh if you remember i said that the aim of qualitative interviewing often is to try and break the formality of the question and answer

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interview format and elicitation tools can be a very good way of of doing that even a step further than a standard qualitative interview one of the reasons is that that um direct eye contact is often broken so um

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it offers people maybe space to sort of have a pause and to reflect as they're as they're for example looking through their photographs or as they're sort of handling an object and looking at it and showing it to the researcher

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and the object or the photograph also offers something else to focus on um rather than necessarily um necessarily having to answer questions that might not be relevant uh to the participants um and as i said that it offers a sort

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of a kind of a quote-unquote natural way to to bring in pauses into an interview so that research participants don't feel the pressure to have to constantly be talking or answering our questions um and the the interview situation is still we

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have to remember the interview situation is still quite strange for a lot of research participants um so having a having an elicitation tool as part of it could can also be a way of breaking the strangeness of this

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interview so for example if we have um well in the old days when people had um photographs in albums we would go and ask people to sort of show us their photo albums for example and looking through a photo album together

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with someone is a very familiar practice that's something that people regularly often will have done with other people as well so that kind of breaks the strangest strangeness of the research interview a bit as well and using an elicitation tool

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also then kind of it it's an activity to be done together with the research participant so during the interview the research participant will for example might be choosing which photographs to show uh might be also then kind of holding holding the

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photograph or the object pointing to things in it comparing different photographs or objects passing these to the researcher to have a look at as well um and also part of the kind of the show and tell is that that research

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participants will sometimes talk about for example the process of taking the photograph or the process of choosing which objects to show um the researcher so it's not it's it's that process of of reflection becomes part of the interview

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as well and i'll come back to that point about these elicitation interviews offering offering kind of space for for reflection for research participants and usually research participants say that they enjoy these elicitation uh interviews so um they might you know that the

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literature has lots of examples of research participants having told the researcher that all this was really enjoyable they felt it was cathartic um some research participants even say that oh it's therapeutic in some way because they have gained a new

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fresh insight into their lives that is somehow helpful for them but it's also important to note that not everyone enjoys elicitation exercises so usually we'll do these as part of a research project where after a more standard interview we give

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research participants the option to take part in another interview that's that then uses elicitation methods or another thing is that elicitation methods can be just one part of a longer interview and sometimes research participants say now i don't fancy that

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that doesn't really sound like something i'd be interested in um so some might find it slightly confusing like why did why do you want to go through my photographs or why do you want to see an object that i

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use in my everyday life for example a colleague of mine has looked at mundane objects in the house for example kitchen utensils so people will be like why do you want to see a worn out wooden spoon in my

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kitchen and why do you want me to talk about it so they can find it quite confusing as to why the researcher wants to do this and some people might find it daunting so they might be a bit like yeah but i'm

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i'm not quite sure what you what you want me to do here what kind of objects and why and and so this is also why it's very important to explain fully to the research participants what you're doing why you're doing it and what you

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want them to do as part of this and i'll come back to this at the end when we talk about practical tips um and then the final point here is that the interview situation um if you remember i said in relation to

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qualitative interviewing in general that the aim is um all that it's sort of um underpinning qualitative research is this assumption that knowledge is contextual um and situated and also that the interaction between the researcher and the research participant is part of that

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knowledge creation so in elicitation situations we are very very aware of this co-creation of knowledge so we see the research participant as the teacher or the guide they are the ones telling us what the significance of particular photographs or objects is so

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an object for example is not not seen as having inherent meaning but it's the meaning that the research participant and the researcher together sort of come to in in that interview situation so using elicitation tools means that research participants have to take time

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to describe and explain the photograph or the object for example who the people in the photograph are why this is a meaningful photograph and then they'll also then go into explaining the various relationships they have with the people in that

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photograph and so on um and this is a good way of then then sort of reducing because sometimes as researchers we will have preset assumptions about what's significant what are the questions to be asking what should we be focusing on so

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elicitation methods can be a good way of of breaking those assumptions of of getting a way of get of getting at um information and knowledge that is significant to the research participants that we as researchers might not have um

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uh sort of presumed from the beginning so in this way as well the knowledge is is co-created with the research participants so elicitation tools can be used to empower our research participants as i've already said this is one way of giving

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participants the opportunity to influence the research process and the researcher agenda they become collaborators in developing insight into a social phenomenon um and this sort of changes the balance um of of the interview um as as it's the

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research participant who chooses what we talk about elicitation tools offer an important a useful prompt so they can be a way of getting research participants to express what matters to them and getting information from research participants perspective so

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understanding what's meaningful and significant for them elicitation tools as as the name of the tin says illicit talk so they can help people uh talk um so for example photographs um you know they they often if their personal photographs for example they

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often evoke emotions so that it can be a way of getting people to talk about um kind of the emotional content of of their relationships for example and elicitation tools are a good way of researching sensitive topics also because they offer they can offer

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um a way for research participants to create reflexive distance from the topic so sometimes when participants are are talking about a photograph or object they can start talking in the third person saying well people generally are like this or people might experience

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this in a particular way so it offers research participants the opportunity to sort of put boundaries around how much they tell about their own personal experience elicitation tools have been found to improve rapport between researcher and participants one of the

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reasons for this is that to do elicitation tools it often means that we have to see our research participants a few times more than once so we might for example have to well in the old days we would drop off uh disposable cameras

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with with participants nowadays of course everyone uses their phone but generally before the before for example participants take a photo or choose an object we have to meet with them to explain what the aims of the research are and so on and how they are to do the

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elicitation bit of the interview so these informal conversations um are a way of establishing rapport with participants and also that kind of the the rebalancing of the power dynamic in in the interview setting can also aid rapport with our participants

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and elicitation tools have been used to reach certain groups and to to get um to sort of have meaningful interview interactions with certain groups of people with whom this kind of interaction might be difficult for various reasons so elicitation

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interviews are very popular in research with children um so it's seen as a for example drawing or show talking about photographs or objects is seen as a child-friendly technique that can be quite fun for children also people who might not be fluent

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in a particular language might find using elicitation tools a bit easier and also those with reduced cognitive capacities so for example those with slowed down processing speeds uh having that opportunity to have those breaks in the interview talk as they're looking at the

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photograph or handling the object can give them time uh to sort of prepare what to say and also for for example um it can be a a an object or a photograph can be a good memory prompt as well for those

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with memory problems and these the the kind of the products the photographs or the objects can also be a good way of engaging audiences so when disseminating research findings audiences often find these photographs and so on very fascinating

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things to see and talk about and sometimes the is engaged in some analysis as well during uh conference sessions and so on but then in terms of what kinds of knowledge we we create using elicitation methods so usually we use elicitation methods to

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enhance existing research methods such as the qualitative interview and the most frequently named motivation for using elicitation methods is to gain insight into research participants perspective as i've already covered um elicitation is a good way of of of

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capturing um aspects of everyday life that are difficult for people to verbalize so they might be difficult to verbalize if they are for example to do with emotions and as i've noted for example photographs can be a good way of sort of

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evoking getting people to talk about those emotions it could be that these are things that they don't normally verbalize for example if if we're asking them to talk about very mundane everyday practices people often don't because they are so

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mundane these practices they often don't think about them very consciously so having an object or a photograph as a prompt can be a way of eliciting talk about this often seen but unnoticed aspect of everyday life and elicitation tools are often used to

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evoke memories as well or they are good at evoking memories so a photograph for example can transport a person back in time to a particular time period or a situation and an object for example gifted by a by by a

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deceased relative might might do the same and often they will these elicitation tools will stimulate thoughts um about experiences and memories that are not necessarily contained in the image or in the object itself so people will then usually start talking

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more widely about their life during that particular time period for example if we're interested in people's sort of past experiences and elicitation methods also a good way of studying the kind of the embodied and sensory dimensions of everyday life

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so for example um a colleague of mine sophie woodward has used sort of clothing elicitation and one of her areas of interest is the kind of the sensory experiences of um wearing clothes just keeping an eye on the time

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uh so now i'll go i'll say a bit more about each of the two types of elicitation photo elicitation and object elicitation um so starting with photo elicitation um the origins of photo elicitation are in visual anthropology and they've um and

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this elicitation methods has since spread to be used very widely at least in sociology and and also other social sciences and the health sciences also have used photo elicitation a lot so the aim is here to use photographs as

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a stimulus to elicit talk about the research topic so the photograph is often seen as a support uh during the research interview um and the aim of using a photograph is is to elicit rich accounts of a particular topic or

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the phenomenon that we're studying and for example that richness can come through if people then by engaging with a photograph if people for example remember more about a pastime or if uh while while looking at a photograph they remember particular

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sensory or embodied experiences for example how a particular place um smelled or looked or sounded um and nowadays when i mean when i started out um photo elicitation was still a bit of a faff like i said you had to take uh disposable cameras to

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people and then go and collect the cameras and have the photographs printed now of course with with um digital technology a lot of people most people have in the uk at least have a mobile phone so and also with with the advent of

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social media taking photographs and and posting them has become a kind of an everyday a part of everyday life particularly for younger generations um and some have said that like photographs are now a favored mode of expression for younger people and it's

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it has an important place in their lives so this is something that people have now become quite familiar with um one thing to think about when doing photo elicitation is whether whether you want to use researcher produced photographs

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that is whether you as a researcher want to pick photographs to show to research participants and get them to engage with those photographs for example there's research on um on kind of historical um historical events and how those

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influence people's lives today for example how the splitting up of different countries in europe during second world war how that in that how that has influenced people's lives who live at the borders of of those newly split countries so

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researchers doing research like that have used photos from from historical periods that the research participants have gone through as a way of eliciting talk about that period the other option is to have participant produced photographs so asking participants to either

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select from their existing photographs such as to show family albums um or to take photographs um that depict a particular topic that you're that you're interested in researching and then another thing to consider is what counts as data when we're doing

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photo elicitation now usually it's the interview that is the data so the photo as i said is there as a as a as a prompt as a support um meaning that it's the interview transcript it's the talk about

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the photograph or it's the talk that the photograph elicits that is data um so it's quite rare for social scientists to analyze the photograph in and of itself some do of course but mostly we tend to focus on the talk about the photograph

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or around the photograph i wanted to i won't go into this in detail but i just wanted to note that there is a particular form of photo elicitation that will probably be of interest to many of you in the audience because this

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has been used or this has been developed in the context of health research and and health promotion research and this is um this approach is called photo voice and it was developed by wang and baris in 1997 so they developed this in the context of

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um of being interested in in sort of public health promotion and being interested in the community aspect so they weren't interested so much in individual people's experiences of of health but rather interested in how public health could be promoted in the role of

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communities and this is um their work draws from freyr's critical pedagogy so this is a participatory um approach where the members of a community are seen as the experts in their own living conditions um so it's in terms of for example doing a needs

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assessment of of how health promotion could be done in a community it's the the community members who are asked to describe uh what health needs there might be in the in the in the community and they do this um through photographs

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so community members will be asked to take photographs for example of what what are the what are the sort of um aspects of your neighborhood for example that promote or or hinder health and then in groups they will have a

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discussion and it's this group discussion that is of interest in photo voice uh in this group discussion that the community members are seen are then invited to um decide what are the common themes and also what are the common solutions for

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any problems they find within their community so the aim of photovoice is really to give community members um the tools to become their own catalysts for social change in their own neighborhood um so the aim here is to activate people in

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communities to change their environments for the better so the aim is to stimulate social action and to allow community members the tools that will enable them to become advocates for their own community and the kind of the final aim is then to use these community

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perspectives to influence policy in this case health policy so now back to photo elicitation in general um so overall um photo elicitation um is seen to sort of promote um people sort of um kind of in-depth involvement and participation in in the

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research um and it does so because it it evokes a different kind of information during the interview so as i've already mentioned using photographs it can evoke people's emotions their memories it can invoke sort of ideas that they have

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about their everyday lives that we as researchers might not have anticipated and photographs are often a good way of getting information about things that sort of remain invisible or hidden or submerged so things that we as researchers would normally maybe have trouble even

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seeing and i've already mentioned this um an important dimension of elicitation research that it affords the creation of of reflective data so already at the stage when people are sort of planning what photographs to take or which photographs to choose or

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at that point um we are asking them to sort of reflect on their lives and then they reflect on their lives further as they go through those photographs with us the researchers um so this can also then offer research participants a sort of a

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new consciousness about their own situation offering them ways to see their own daily lives uh through fresh eyes um and photographs can allow us researchers access to situations or settings that we normally don't have access to so we can

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sort of come to see uh what's hidden and private but but the important thing here is that we come to see in a controlled way so the research participant has control over which aspects of their lives we come to see

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so one example of this is a is um a study of schools i think it was in new zealand or australia this study and the researcher had asked pupils to photograph spaces that were somehow meaningful for them in school and one of the spaces

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that were was photographed was changing rooms and of course we as researchers wouldn't have access to children's changing rooms um but by sort of photographing these changing rooms this then sort of evoked talk about the significance of changing rooms for

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example there's spaces where where pop pupils might feel self-conscious about their bodies or spaces where they might experience bullying and so on so these dimensions of the school experience might not have become visible to the researcher have they not used

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photographs and as i've already mentioned the the using photos allows for emergent knowledge to come forward so this is knowledge that that is from the perspective of the participant we we tend to get very rich data um and this partly this richness of the

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data um derives from the fact that we are the photographs bring into view and bring into discussion uh dimensions of experience um that are often not spoken about in a standard interview so for example the the kind of the

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mundane dimensions of life or certain memories or the details of certain places and people and relationships that maybe participants might have difficult difficult difficulties in recalling in a standard interview but the photograph acts as a prompt and as a

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as an aid memoir in the interview to actually start talking in more depth about different dimensions of that experience as well um so we often get sort of more more rich and deeper more elaborated accounts when we're using photo elicitation

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and i've got example studies example studies here i won't go through them in in depth because i want to make sure that i finish on time but as you can see um photo elicitation has been used in in

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various um in various research to do with experiences of depression uh mental health and and so on um and the the kind of what what unites these risks these pieces of research is is the kind of the wish to get at sort

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of um uh exploring areas of of this experience of mental health um problems from the perspective of the participants and then i'll spend just a few minutes i'm going to go slightly over the 45 minutes i think is i'll spend a few minutes talking

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about object solicitation now not as much has been done around object elicitation as around photo elicitation so this section will be a bit shorter um so the object elicitation method is inspired by the photo elicitation method and it builds on the insight developed

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within a an area of research that's called sort of material culture um and this um insight is that that objects material things have significance in people's lives so things are not just things they play important they play an

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important role in people's lives for example in shaping our sense of who we are objects also have capacities to do things so objects can for example encourage us towards some uses or some actions more than others and object elicitation means that we're

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using objects as a way of eliciting talk about a specific topic um and usually object elicitation is is used um in such a way that we ask research participants to select objects that are part of their everyday lives

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um and that carry meaning to them that is relevant to the phenomenon that we're studying so we can ask participants either to pick a so-called epiphenol object which means an object that is highly meaningful and and it's p and

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it's pivotal so for example wedding gifts or heirlooms or we can ask them to pick mundane objects such as kitchen utensils um so they pick which objects are significant to them in relation to the to the topic and they also reflect on this before the

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interview and during the interview similarly to the photo renocitation interviews now object interviews feel more strange than photo elicitation interviews and researchers who've used object elicitation interviews say that they they often encounter some sort of bafflement and even maybe a bit

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of alarm from their research participants so research participants are a bit unsure of why why are you doing this why do you want me to pick kitchen utensils um so people can be a bit puzzled and unsure about what it is that they're

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doing here so with object object interviews it's very very important to sort of brief participants and tell them and to think about you want to tell them what type of object they need to select or not and and also tell them how many objects

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and so on and explain to them why you're doing this and then um we can either ask people to talk about the object in in its usual context so talking about objects in the home while we interview people in their homes and here we might

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be interested in how the object sits within mundane everyday practices or we can ask people to bring the object into a different setting so for example if we're conducting an interview in a cafe we can ask people to bring the

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object to the cafe and sometimes by seeing this object in a new environment this can then jolt research participants into new understandings about the object and and the phenomenon that the object is meant to elicit talk about and again here the issue is you know

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what counts as data so usually it's the interview transcript but also within this this type of research because it it's usually conducted by people who are interested in materiality and interested in the role of things in people's lives

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often researchers using this method will also be analyzing the object and its materiality or analyzing the subject object relationship so looking at for example how research participants handle an object during the interview and we're interested in as i said the

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role that material objects play in people's lives and usually the focus is on unremarkable objects and these are often overlooked things in our lives and yet they play a crucial crucial role in our lives so it's trying to get at what is that role that they

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play um objects are also attached to our our sense of identity and also agency so in research with people with dementia for example it has been noted that that having access to functional objects is a form of citizenship so removing

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certain objects such as the use of a stove or the use of an iron can be felt very keenly by people with dementia as a sort of restricting of of their agency and objects help facilitate recall so they can be receptacles or anchors for

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memories and stories and just like photographs objects can then elicit richer narratives than we would get in standard interviews and in terms of what kinds of knowledge we we usually get um detail about lived experience uh through object

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solicitation uh we get people to sort of describe the quality and the texture of their everyday life world in a material sense as well and object interviews can help uncover new and unexpected areas of experience so that the scene but

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unnoticed things that people usually don't notice but that come to view differently when when they're actually talking about an object so these are often things that they don't usually articulate so this can offer people the people who take part in research but

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also researchers uh fresh insight into a particular phenomenon or experience and as i've said objects are very good at evoking sensory experiences so the kind of they can be very good at eliciting embodied sensory accounts of how certain situations or certain practices

Speaker A

or certain relationships how those actually feel and how they are how they are experienced in an embodied sense and again there's two example studies um that have used object interviews and both of those are sort of trying to

Speaker A

get at the get up the sort of the aspects of an experience that that usually is is overlooked uh so for example in in willie's research on experiences of living with advanced cancer um it using objects brought to light

Speaker A

not just what's missing so if someone is expecting their life life expectancy to be reduced will usually think of that as something being removed as an absence absences in their lives but this research brought to life that that this also opens up spaces

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in their life and what meanings do they then create within those spaces and then briefly on ethical issues as with any kind of research informed consent is important and as i've already pointed out this includes then explaining in detail

Speaker A

you know what what we're doing with an elicitation interview how we're going to do it and why so they need to understand why we're doing this these can be emotionally very powerful and this can sometimes take the research

Speaker A

participants by surprise so it's worth giving them some advanced warning as well that you know that that the photograph or the object might suddenly evoke a very powerful uh emotion and then to sort of think in advance about how you're gonna handle this

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situation so emotions in themselves even even even sad emotions are not bad in and of themselves but it's just good to be aware that you need to have a way of handling that situation in the interview um so i would suggest uh doing a

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practice interview where you are the interviewee where you are the one talking about a photograph or an object just to get a sense of how how quickly and how unexpectedly we can move into emotional terrain using this kind of

Speaker A

method and then particularly with visual data there are lots of issues to consider and then there's there's an extensive literature on the ethics of using visual data and one of the issues there of course is anonymity and researchers have handled this

Speaker A

differently for example some say if they ask participants to take photographs they say don't take photographs of people only of places and things um you need to if you're going to use those photographs in in your research uh in in any other way

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you need to get permission from the research participants so usually we ask for separate permission for analysis and then separate permission maybe photo by photo to use those photographs in dissemination and also then here again the kind of the

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importance of briefing participants are also about the ethical considerations and how we're thinking about these ethical considerations and how they can play a part as well in ensuring uh the ethical conduct of research and i'll just end with a few uh

Speaker A

practical tips five minutes over apologies um that it's important to so um what we need to do usually with with with um elicitation uh research elicitation methods is that there is that that need to meet with participants at least twice as i've already mentioned

Speaker A

and it's it's important to give participants um in-depth advice that's something i've also mentioned about what what the interview will look like at what point the elicitation portion will come and so on what we expect of this and what their role in

Speaker A

this is and then have a think about the interview style and focus so for example will you start with the elicitation portion of the interview will you do it in the middle as a way of sort of breaking

Speaker A

breaking the interview a bit giving them a bit of a breather or do you end with it do you need to develop some rapport with the participant before you come to the elicitation portion of the interview and that will

Speaker A

of course depend on the subject uh the topic of your interview part b as well um and think about as i've i've kind of indicated already we need to already from the outset think about what counts as data so is it just the talk that's

Speaker A

elicited through the through the use of that elicitation tool or is it the elicitation tool itself as well that we wish to uh analyze or is it also the kind of the embodied way in which people handle the elicitation tool and

Speaker A

then to make sure that we we record that data or record those data appropriately and also to think about how we're going to analyze the data and then thinking about how we're going to use are we going to use

Speaker A

the elicitation tools in any way in dissemination so do we wish to use photographs in our conference papers or publications how might we might we want to photograph the objects that people show us um and and include those those in our

Speaker A

dissemination as well right i shall end there and open for questions you so much vanessa that was a really fascinating talk full of very rich and detailed examples of these methods so um we have some time for q a uh please type in your questions

Speaker A

into the q a box in zoom i'll read them out as i go along so right start there's a question about time limits in interviews so how do you best balance elicitation in an interview protocol in a semi-structured interview

Speaker A

and then but then just let the interviews share the stories that they're very eager to tell how do you find that balance yeah i mean i've to be honest i i yeah because sometimes this is a thing that you can't rush so if you have a

Speaker A

very strict time limit you might want to consider whether an elicitation method is something that you should use i mean i'd i'd always say do pilot interviews and and sort of have a think about you might for example

Speaker A

uh use it in the beginning of the interview just as a way of of warming up the participants and getting them talking about the topic or you might say right we've got five minutes here at the end and do it but then you'd have to think

Speaker A

about is the elicitation because the the aim of the elicitation method is to cr is to sort of access rich nuanced accounts and those take time to tell so i would sort of have a think about should you should you be using the

Speaker A

elicitation method if if there is a very strict time limit also what we usually do is we usually use list safe and elicitation methods in research where we interview participants more than once so that is the actually the way that we

Speaker A

because it they can also they can often be lengthy interviews we usually do it do two interviews so we usually do one standard interview where we get to know the participant and get to know what they think about the

Speaker A

topic and then do a second elicitation interview and that sort of gives us more depth into it so that's another way of maybe maybe doing it okay thank you um before i come up to the second question uh

Speaker A

maybe he stopped sharing your screen vanessa yeah yeah i just wanted people to also see that um [Music] so the second question is um to what extent are these methods different from existing qualitative data methods such as photovoice

Speaker A

protective techniques used in focus groups interviews uh well like i explained photo voice is one form of photo elicitation um and i think um because the the two i don't know what projective techniques are but i would assume though well photovoice is an

Speaker A

elicitation method and i i may be for projective technique might also be an elicitation method sure okay um another question for the same person is uh are there any concerns about universal sort of university ethics reviews committees or using elicitation

Speaker A

methods have you come across any problems in getting this through ethics um i think that the the the one of the the most important concern that ethics committees will have is around anonymity so they will want to make sure that um if

Speaker A

if people are being photographed that the research participants understand how those photographs will be used so sometimes we don't even we don't use those photographs in publications especially if they've got people in them but yeah so ethics committees will be

Speaker A

very interested in issues around anonymity and also so if if the people have photographed themselves we need to get clearance to use that photograph if they photographed other people that's where you might hit problems because you would then need to

Speaker A

get consent of those other people who are identifiable in those photographs you use them usually to use them in dissemination but so ethics committees would want to go through the protocols very carefully as to will how so sometimes anonymity isn't

Speaker A

sometimes we do use photographs of people uh in our in our research with their consent and that's perfectly fine if you've explained it to research participants so full anonymity isn't always what researchers aim for even depending on the topic as well

Speaker A

um another question about uh photo the differences between photo elicitation and photovoice um i think yeah you've explained that there you know um photovoices is one of the technique yeah yeah i think the main differences are that photovoices is um is done at the group

Speaker A

level so the interest is in how the group comes to a decision about what are the core themes what are the core issues in that community and what what the solutions might be whereas photo elicitation tends not always but photo elicitation is

Speaker A

often used with individuals so the interest in photo elicitation is sort of the individual perspective and the individual experience and also photovoice is very specific and usually used within health research and public health promotion whereas photo elicitation is used in a more broad it

Speaker A

has a broader application um here's another question can you give some examples of useful facilitating questions to ask in a photo or objective visitation yes i can yes i can let me i've got i've noted them because my memory is not as good as it

Speaker A

used to be so here we go prompt just a second i'll do a search function yeah so here we go um so again and this is something that that you and this is related to those practical tips at the end about

Speaker A

interview style so to what extent do you want to at all guide the interview or do you want to let the participant talk and sometimes of course we we have participants who need who need prompting more than others so others are very

Speaker A

happy to talk and some some need a bit of more prompting so usually it's good to have have thought out what kinds of prompts you might want to use in your particular research so for example you could ask them to

Speaker A

explain why you chose this particular photograph or this particular object then ask them to sort of say how do you think this photo or object captures the topic that we're talking about ask them sort of why do you think that

Speaker A

this photo or this object is important uh in talking about uh the topic uh also sort of um is there anything else you might want to discuss um about your experience um which isn't sort of depicted here but might have

Speaker A

sort of come to mind as as they were looking at the photo or or the object and there's a there's a sort of a one um tip from uh willie who was who did that research on living with

Speaker A

dying um she sort of gave a tip that remember that that also that the aim of the elicitation tool is to elicit talk about the phenomenon so to not just stick to talking about the object itself or the or the elicitation tool

Speaker A

itself and she gives the example of an interviewer interviewing a woman who was living with terminal cancer and the woman had brought in a piece of music as a as illustrating that that this was a sort of a

Speaker A

unfinished business in her life that she hadn't fulfilled her potential as a musician and the interviewer kept going back to the piece of music like why this piece of music and what does this piece of music tell you about what does this

Speaker A

tell us about your whereas the woman was trying to say something a bit broader in the interview saying i wanted to become a musician and i didn't and now i won't be able to so how do i deal with this unfinished

Speaker A

business it wasn't so much that particular piece of music so remembering what what we're trying to do when we're doing elicitation really fascinating um because question about typical data analysis methods for photovoice but i guess it's not just about photovoice but yeah yeah

Speaker A

so i think for photo elicitation um and um generally it is it will often be the kind of the standard uh qualitative methods for analyzing interview data and those can vary from just thematic analysis uh we might want

Speaker A

to do discourse analysis uh even narrative analysis is a possibility so any of the kind of the more standard analysis techniques that we might use um well we have quite a few questions here i hope you have a little bit more time

Speaker A

so yes for those of you who are um interested please stay stay on the line and um we've got vanessa captain here so yeah you got me at least until half past so you know i'm sure we'll get through

Speaker A

these yes so there's uh there's a question about um somebody who comes who works in the field of new media art so here they've got art pieces that are potentially used where the photos is it necessary the photo is owned or

Speaker A

created by the project yeah can we ask the participants to search photos from the web to assist in illustrating their ideas yeah no absolutely it doesn't have to be created by the participant so yeah that's a that's actually yeah something

Speaker A

i didn't mention yeah because either we as researchers can give them images to to talk about or that that would be a good way of yeah asking them to search the web for relevant i mean what one one

Speaker A

approach that you um someone has used um i forget who now but is collage so asking people to create a collage so you might give people like a bunch of magazines and say cut out pictures and do a collage of this topic

Speaker A

that speaks to you so that could be one another way of using existing images created by someone else um so there's a question here about the selection you know who does the selection so you know if the participants are selecting the

Speaker A

object or photos or if you the researchers are selecting the objects or photos um is there a difference are there biases likely to happen with one method objective yeah that's an interesting question and and again that's something to

Speaker A

because you could do it either way so it's important to sort of think about which would be which of those is more meaningful to whatever you're interested in researching um so um what we most usually we ask participants to

Speaker A

select the objects or the photographs that are meaningful for them the reason for this is because we are generally in usually we are interested in participants perspectives so this is a way of getting out those perspectives is by allowing them time to reflect on the

Speaker A

topic and choose images and photographs um that that speak to that particular topic in terms of and then we might for example ask them to say they've got ten photographs we might ask them to then put them in a

Speaker A

particular order and tell us a story about that or for example if they we've asked them to photograph um for example what what are what are different things that might hinder your health and they've got five photographs we

Speaker A

might say put these in order which is which is the worst and which is the least worst and then talk about that um so usually we give a lot of that control but not everyone has to do that

Speaker A

but usually the control of that is given to the research participant in terms of bias well i'm a qualitative researcher so i don't use the concept of bias because as i said all knowledge is contextual and situated but

Speaker A

that is something to take into consideration is is as i noted to what extent research participants might be choosing objects or photographs just to please you as the researcher and also um if if you if you give them too many you

Speaker A

know how not too many but the more guidance you give to the research participants as to this is what i want these types of objects these types of photographs the more you are then guiding actually the knowledge that will be created but

Speaker A

if you give give research participants very vague information of just generally just photograph whatever makes you happy um that will give them more control over the content but it can then also confuse participants so sort of finding that

Speaker A

balance between how much do you want to guide the content and how much do you let the participants just freely choose um i'm failing to read out all the many uh messages thanking you and for the inspiring talk and wonderful talk so uh

Speaker A

you know please please note that there's many uh lots of gratitude expressed by the participants so an additional question here about um shared that the interview process can be emotionally powerful may have even therapeutic effects how do you handle

Speaker A

those situations where generating these powerful emotions and again there's no right or wrong here and it depends also on the on the personality of the researcher but i think because regardless of type of interview i've conducted i have had

Speaker A

research participants who cried for example so crying is the usual the usual thing and i because i think that crying in and of itself isn't bad it's a natural reaction to so a painful memory for example or loss

Speaker A

um and in fact the research participants who have started crying because the usual thing we do there is we say to them um well before the interview even starts we will say to them you're in control you don't have to talk about something that

Speaker A

is too painful or that you don't want to talk about the thing is participants often do want to talk about sometimes the painful things that have happened to them um so when if they do start crying i will usually then sort of say do you

Speaker A

want us to have a bit of a break um for me personally i kind of think is it it's reacting in a way that doesn't go oh my god you're crying this is the worst thing that could happen oh god but

Speaker A

just to be okay you're crying perfectly fine do you want to have a break usually participants say no and usually they say i always cry at this point i always cry when i talk about this so um it's sort of thinking about also degrees

Speaker A

of trauma that are involved so for example i have i i haven't researched on on hugely traumatic experiences so i couldn't speak to what it might be like to to interview people about hugely traumatic things and i think there you might sort of consider

Speaker A

consider things like to what extent you have the capacity to do those kinds of interviews um but it's also it's a dialogue with the research participant what to do in that situation but do they want to carry on

Speaker A

or do they want to have a bit of a break and then maybe move on to another topic there's a question here about uh a group interview context would the participants be less willing to share uh depending on the photos you know if

Speaker A

it's in a group interview context versus a one-to-one i guess i would assume um i mean yes the group group the group context will invariably have an effect so but generally also in those group contexts it's unusual to ask

Speaker A

participants to share hugely personal photographs so usually we're asking them photograph for example aspects of your neighborhood so what are sort of health health promoting aspects of your neighborhood for example so they might photograph a park or what are aspects of your neighborhood

Speaker A

that that are um sort of detrimental to your health or your well-being and they would then photograph cracked pavements and so on so i think it's also that the type of photograph that researchers are after in those two types of interview are quite

Speaker A

different sure um there's a question here about illustration methods of photos and pictures painted by participants so uh yes yeah so we have done in the morgan center we had a sketching project um ongoing for a while and some of us

Speaker A

did actually get research participants um to draw and and sketch as well um the thing is that and and drawing and sketching is used with children because the assumption is that children can draw whereas adults and that is usually if

Speaker A

you ask an adult to draw the first thing they'll say is i can't draw whereas i think children because they are often drawing at school so drawing is still a part of their everyday lives in research we've often

Speaker A

asked children to draw and that seems to be okay for children and as i've said before with children these kinds of methods are maybe a way of engaging them because they don't necessarily have to then talk they can draw a thing then they don't

Speaker A

necessarily have to say a lot about it and there's another question here about if you're familiar with um the micro phenomena you know phenomenological interview uh techniques uh it's called um explication explication sorry explicitation interview developed by pierre vermeers and claire

Speaker A

fatigue uh yeah i'm not getting my mind my name's alright yeah i've i've spotted the question there though yeah no i've never come across this um so i'm gonna have to look into that so unfortunately okay i wouldn't be able to say how it

Speaker A

compares sure um so here's somebody that's uh that hasn't done qualitative research before but maybe you've inspired them so they're hoping to use photo elicitation as a tool for educational research and medical students are there any resources or guidelines that they can

Speaker A

use to implement these methods um because so much has been written about photo elicitation interviews so your best bet is just to go into google scholar and put in photo elicitation interviews there's a there's a journal called qualitative researching or qualitative

Speaker A

research it's a journal published by sage i would maybe go into that journal and do a search within that about photo elicitation uh interviews i think any any journal article that discusses photo less station into these will will be a

Speaker A

good start but i had in my if i share my screen once more i had at the end um so padgett and colleagues uh um article i think that is that would be a good place to start because that will also

Speaker A

give you some references to previous work um yeah yes thank you vanessa this is great um i think slightly similar question here um so somebody that has research participants with um their participants have intellectual disabilities so some of them are not

Speaker A

very articulate in interviews so they want to use photo content analysis uh do you have any suggestions for photo content analysis uh this goes beyond my expertise because i'm i'm not uh in that sense i'm not a visual analyst so i i wouldn't have the

Speaker A

tools to analyze the content of photos but i there are people who have done this so again i would say google google scholar or any other kind of database that allows you to search for academic um academic content

Speaker A

there's a book by um i'm not sure but a colleague of mine can i write in the chat if i write something in the chat i oh yes it's hosts and panelists anyway there is a colleague of mine called

Speaker A

penny tinkler k l e r and she's written a book on visual methods and i'm pretty sure that somewhere in her book there will be a section discussing analyzing the actual visual the visual content of the visual data so

Speaker A

that might be a good place to start thank you um here's a question if you can show any examples of analysis of dialogues between researcher and participants um well if you if you go into um [Music] most of the the empirical research

Speaker A

papers that have been published using um photo elicitation or object solicitation will have examples of that because that is usually part of the part of the data is is then talking about the photograph and and the dialogue uh dialogue between them

Speaker A

so i would say just pick most of the published work we'll have something on this oh and again i think possibly the the two examples i had at the end those might be particularly good somebody suggesting that uh com i

Speaker A

imagine that conversations about how how participants came to choose their food or objects would also yield meaningful insights uh yeah is that part of them i guess that's part of the method yeah yeah so i think i mentioned it that

Speaker A

that part the the interview it it it offers elicitation methods offer participants space to reflect and part of that reflection is we might ask them why did you choose this object or they might tell us sometimes they can also tell us for

Speaker A

example if if it's an if it's a photograph they've taken they will tell us the process of taking the photograph they'll describe the situation why they chose to take that photograph how they took it and and so on so that that that it's not

Speaker A

just the product it's the process that's part of the interview talk yeah definitely i i want to ask a question myself um yeah you mentioned right at the start of about how photos objects can be um virtual or you know lost objects and

Speaker A

as some you know as a migrant many times over i've lost many things i hardly have any photographs left um how does that work you know you know when you when you try to reconstruct objects or photographs then you're kind of relying on people's

Speaker A

memory but the thing is that if it's an object or a photograph that you remember there's something significant about it so in a way it doesn't quite matter what exactly the photograph would have looked like but it's the it's the significance

Speaker A

of it and the talk that that elicits um so yeah as a migrant myself yeah i know that there are things lost in you know the time just seem to have evaporated some things but they they are still meaningful and they are objects or

Speaker A

photographs that i remember and that i probably will remember for the rest of my life and they are meaningful for some reason and it's that reason that we as researchers would mostly be interested in i think well uh thank you so much vanessa for

Speaker A

for this really wonderful talk uh and you know as you can see there are lots and lots of there's lots and lots of interest here i think you found and you managed to go to to inspire quite a few

Speaker A

people from your talk today so big thank you once again for doing this talk just to let people know that our next method hub seminar will be on the 13th of may so do come along it's uh it's a the

Speaker A

topic is a bit different it's on machine learning methods to produce bias and regression analysis given by professor zhang han from the hong kong university of science and technology uh but once again uh thank you everyone for joining in today and thank you very

Speaker A

much professor vanessa may for your wonderful talk thank you oh thank you to the audience really good questions and i've had a quick scan so there were really good questions we didn't get around to as well but um but yeah if you

Speaker A

have a burning question do feel free to email me great thank you bye bye

Topics:elicitation methodsqualitative researchphoto elicitationobject elicitationqualitative interviewssocial sciencesresearch methodshealth researchnarrative analysisethical issues

Frequently Asked Questions

What are elicitation methods in qualitative research?

Elicitation methods are qualitative interview techniques that use tools like photographs or objects to prompt participants to share deeper narratives and experiences that might not arise in standard interviews.

Why might researchers choose to use photo elicitation?

Photo elicitation is commonly used because it helps participants recall and articulate experiences and meanings associated with images, leading to richer, more nuanced data.

What ethical considerations are involved in using elicitation methods?

Researchers need to consider issues such as participant consent, the sensitivity of elicited material, and the impact of the researcher-participant relationship on the data collected.

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