Visual Techniques Applied in Social Research

Photos have long been used by social scientists all over the world, for example, in researching social and economic inequality, social change, perceptions, studying family history, or some biographical themes, etc. Drawings are frequently used in studies which refer to the description of different experiences the subjects are experiencing (e.g., divorce, emigration, hospitalization, dismissal, incarceration, change of leadership in an organization, etc.), in studies that address sensitive topics (e.g. understanding the disease, description of pain, knowledge about HIV/AIDS), etc. Films are similarly used in ethnographic, ethno-methodological, and cultural studies, in market studies, in the study of poverty, drug use, professional interactions, etc.

The specialty literature suggests the great potential of visual data in as far as the advancement of social knowledge is concerned, and this has made me believe that the future of this knowledge will be tightly connected to the use of visual data in research. That is why, I have proposed by this project to add the visual techniques in the methodological ‘kit’ of the social scientists in Braşov and to spread their use in the Romanian social studies. And by this book, I try to popularize our attempts to bring Romania’s visual studies to the attention of the international public, to propose novel methodological discussions on the use of visual data in social research, and to highlight the multitude and variety of research contexts where the visual can be applied.

Thus, the main objective of the project was the use of visual techniques in various social research situations. I have proposed applying new techniques, novel for Romania, with a view to show their potential and to encourage Romanian researchers to use them. After applying the visual techniques, the project aimed at analyzing the relevance of these techniques for enhancing social knowledge. We wanted to demonstrate, by comparison to the classical techniques used in social research, what kind of information generates the application of visual techniques, how this information differs from that collected by other means, in what research situations the visual techniques are better suited, and if they bring about, by their application, a significant contribution to the comprehension of the phenomena under study.

If the first objective was a new one at the national level, the second aimed at enriching international knowledge. Thus, although in the specialty Western literature there are numerous examples of social research cases where visual data were used, there are very few studies in which the results obtained after the application of the visual techniques are compared with the results obtained from the application of classical techniques in identical or similar research situations.

In order to accomplish these goals, I formed a team where each member was responsible for applying one or more visual techniques in their own research projects. Most team members applied these new techniques in their field of interest and expertise, in projects they had previously worked on with techniques other than the visual ones. Firstly, my colleagues became acquainted with the new techniques, then, they applied them for the first time in their research and, in the end, they compared the newly obtained results to previous results from identical or similar studies in which they applied classical research techniques.

Each team member had their own research objective so that a spectacular variety of situations where we applied visual techniques resulted. Therefore, we have set as objectives: to capture community dynamics in Drăguş village, to identify the specific characteristics of volunteers in the social field, to find out what the defining aspects of adolescents’ identity are, to discover how elderly people’s identity changes after retirement, to identify the way in which preschoolers and early schoolers represent divinity, to discover the manner in which the partner is perceived at different stages of the family life cycle by social workers, and to find out in what contexts bound to school activities students experiment moral emotions – shame, embarrassment, and guilt. None of these objectives has ever been addressed from a visual perspective, either in Romania or abroad (it is only the one referring to adolescent identity that might have approximate correspondence in the specialty international literature).

From a methodological point of view, the plan was that each member of the team should choose (depending on the research objectives, participants’ availability, ethical, deontological limitations, etc.) and should apply one or more of the existing visual methods and techniques of data collection. For example, to capture in images the studied ‘object’ – namely, to take photos, to film or, in the impossibility of using the cameras, to draw what they see; to collect already available or provoked visual documents; to perform visual elicitation interviews, etc.

Then, each member of the team had to process and analyze the collected data, for example, by classification (using a priori or emergent categories), by quantification, counting, etc. The processing and analysis operations of the images referred to the content of the images and to the interpretations given by the participants, without the researchers attributing meaning to some of the components of the visual representations (as psychologists usually do). For example, a drawn hollow was nothing else than a hollow or the place where the subject would hide from his/her parents (as he/she confessed in the interview), not a childhood trauma as a psychologist would interpret it. We were interested in the perspective of those under study, in the interpretations that they gave to the elements in the images; we processed and analyzed the aspects obvious to the researcher or the aspects revealed by the subjects in the interviews about images, not the unconscious aspects revealed by any psychoanalysis.

And in interpreting data, each member of the team had to show how they applied, verified, completed, modified, or grounded theories in their own visual study.

The plan, precisely accomplished, was the following: for each stage of the research I organized training meetings with the team members; there were seven school meetings that also referred to the analysis of the visual data by means of NVivo 10 software, to the use of images in presenting the results of the research, and to the observance of ethical and deontological rules specific to image research. After each training session, each member of the team put into practice, in their own research project, what they learnt – they collected visual data, analyzed them, and interpreted them under my direct supervision. The last session was a workshop when we analyzed the relevance of visual data for each piece of research (by comparison to the results obtained in previous similar studies where other types of data were collected by using techniques other than the visual ones). The end of the project was dedicated to writing a chapter in a collective volume by each member of the team. This book includes, besides the introductory chapter, a methodological one written by me where the relevance of visual data in social research is analyzed and seven chapters, one written by each member of the team, describing the studies where they applied the visual techniques.

Subsequently, I present each chapter of the book and each of their authors. I will mention what each chapter deals with (the objectives of the study, the methodology, what it brings new, and the conclusions of the research) and what is the previous expertise of the authors in the topic under research.

The first chapter, the one about the relevance of visual data in social research, is written by me. I am an associate professor, and I have been teaching for 15 years courses on qualitative research methods and techniques. Lately, my interests have also focused on qualitative visual data. Consequently, I also teach a course on Visual Sociology in Communication and Public Relations Program, and I am preparing one course on Techniques for Image Analysis and Interpretation for the Digital Media Program. As I have stated at the beginning of this introduction, in 2016, I wrote the first book in Romania on visual research: Visual Data in Social Research published by Cluj University Press Publishing House. I also published in internationally recognized journals – an article on the visual representation of the social structure in Romania and a visual essay by which I tried to describe in images what it means to live with an incurable disease. In the first study, the participants were asked to draw the representatives of the social classes (‘Acceptable and Unacceptable Sources of Inequality in Romania, A Visual Study,’ published in TRAMES - A Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 19, no. 4, 2015), and, in the second study the participants were asked to take photos of aspects of their everyday lives (‘Photovoice: Adult Patients of Hospice Braşov (Romania) on What it Means to Live with Cancer’, published in Visual Communication, vol. 16, No. 2, 2017). I also participated in international conferences organized in Romania and Canada where I presented the results obtained in the studies where I collected, analyzed and interpreted visual data.

The second chapter, the one about the study of change in a rural community in Romania, is written by Codrina Csesznek. Codrina has been an associate professor since 2008; she is interested in studying (local and ethnic) communities and their community development mechanisms. She teaches courses on the Sociology of Community Development, Community Development Strategies, and Sociology of Interethnic Relations. She defended her PhD thesis entitled ‘Social Networks of Local Elite in Harghita and Covasna Counties’ in 2006 at Bucharest University, and she defines herself as a qualitative sociologist. She had her book Ethnic Communities and Local Elites published in 2007 at ‘Transylvania’ University Publishing House in Braşov and two illustrated volumes related to the rural community that became the subject of study for this book, too: ‘Drăguş. Images of a Romanian Village’ at C2 Design Publishing House in Braşov and ‘Studies and Confessions about Contemporary Drăguş’ at Cluj University Press Publishing House. Equally, in the book Italy-Romania. L’esperienza completa della migrazione, published in 2014 in Italy at Kurumuny Publishing House, Codrina presented the results of studying the return migration phenomenon to Drăguş community. She had articles published on the civic engagement in local communities, on the role of the ethnic economy in local development, on the assessment of needs in these communities, on the experiences of foreign tourists in Transylvania’s rural area and others. Similarly, Codrina also participated in several international conferences in Italy and Romania where she talked about rural communities and social change.