CHAPTER FOUR METHODOLOGY
4.4. Data collection methods
4.4.1. Visual research method
The photo-narrative method combined the production of photographs by participants in the course of their day-to-day living with narrative responses within a semi-structured interview in which participants had the opportunity to comment on each of the
photographs they had produced. The template for the method used was a recent study of children's experience of their school environments in South Africa (Karlsson, 2001).
Photo-narrative has some similarity to another visual research method, participatory 'photo-voice', in that participants use or produce photographs from their everyday life, however, some aspects of the process and outcomes are different (Wang, Wu, Zhan &
Carovino, 1998; Wang, 1999). The main aim of photo-narrative is to empower participants to become the creators and narrators of visual material that represents the lived texture of experience within sociocultural contexts. It is a process which allows participants to engage in the exploration of the research objectives and reflect
meaningfully on situated experience within educational, familial and other sociocultural contexts (Karlsson, 2001).
In Karlsson's study school learners took photographs of their school environment as an exploration of the 'layering' of apartheid and post-apartheid discourses in the
representational and physical space of the school. Karlsson argues that space is socially constructed and is re-inscribed by political-spatial relations. This idea of'spatial
subjectivity' is compatible with the dialogical notion of the relative 'spatial' positionality of speaking positions within the self (Hermans & Kempen, 1993). In Karlsson's study,
participants were given disposable cameras and asked to take photographs based on the caption, 'me and my school'. This was followed by a semi-structured, debriefing
interview which functioned largely as an opportunity for the participants to talk about and caption the photographs. Emphasis was placed on 'telling a story' about the photographs, in order to reveal narratives that were situated in visual perspectivity. Findings suggested that perspectives were presented from 'insider' and outsider' perspectives. Also spaces and time frames were subjectively and socially constructed as 'frontstage' or 'backstage' (Karlsson,2001).
Although this method is a relatively new one, critical commentary on the use of
photographic material in social science research is worth considering. Duffield (1998) suggests the following points: (a) photography has an element of selectivity which makes any photograph a perspective of sorts; (b) because of the apparent immediacy of the photograph it may acquire a realism that has the power to misrepresent; (c) subjective meanings are created in producing or viewing photographs; (d) given the potential of photographs to misrepresent persons or contexts there is a need to make the purposes for which images are produced an important consideration. The implication of (a) for this study was that the photographic images produced should not be taken as objective
entities, rather, should be considered as the participants' selected perspective. In terms of (b) and (c) it was considered important that the subjective meanings of the photographs could not be established without the verbal commentary provided by the participants during the interviews. In terms of (d), it was important that the ethical implications of using photographs was considered and made explicit to participants. For a more detailed discussion of photographs and subjectivity beyond the scope of this dissertation, see Sontag (1977) and Barthes (1984).
4.4.2. Interview method
Silverman (2001) suggests that from a constructionist position, as opposed to a
positivistic or emotionalist approach, interview accounts are both 'representations of the world' and are a 'part of the world they describe' (p. 95). The focus of constructionist
interviewing is thus upon how interview participants are engaged in actively constructing meaning (Silverman, 2001). Interviewing in this research followed a constructionist paradigm. Thus, in keeping with the research problem this approach to interviewing was interested in the 'hows' and to a lesser extent the 'whats' of participant's accounts (Silverman 2001). An 'interviewee centred' style was adopted, where the interviewer facilitated development of participant concerns by encouraging reflection and illustrative biographical material (Frosh et al., 2003). The constructionist approaches to interviewing considered the reciprocal influences of interviewer and interviewee, and sought to
minimise interviewer influences within a mutually collaborative process that encouraged reflective and extended responses (Fontana & Frey, 2003; Kvale, 1996; Mishler, 1986).
The techniques of polyphonic interviewing and oralysis were a part of the constructionist approach used in this study (Fontana & Frey, 2003). Polyphonic interviewing is an approach which creates a facilitative environment in which divergent or multiple
interviewee perspectives are expressed and foregrounds the contradictions and anomalies of unprompted participant responses (Fontana & Frey, 2003). Oralysis refers to the interactive combination of talk with visual texts, which in the case of this study, refers to participants providing a personal commentary on each of the photographs in the context of the semi-structured interview (Fontana & Frey, 2003). For convenience, the
combination of these techniques within a constructionist approach will be termed 'multivocal oralysis'.
The semi-structured interview method consisted of a series of open-ended questions that drew participants' attention to the photographs and encouraged narrative or biographical responses - in effect, multivocal oralysis. It is suggested that engagement in a process of image-production allowed meanings to emerge that had been negotiated and considered in the lived textures of sociocultural contexts and not in the de-contextualised moment of the interview. Multivocal oralysis may also have allowed the interview participant to be prompted by visual reminders of the sociocultural context, such that the interviewee was 'with' the context of his everyday life in the moment of the interview. This process matches the aims of the study in terms of exploring gender subjectivities in microcultural contexts. Given the open-endedness of the oralysis process, a diversity of spatiotemporal
contexts was possible, allowing access to the multiple subject positions that might occur across microcultures and sociocultural contexts. This technique thus matched the aim of exploring the multivoiced performance of masculinity in school microcultures and across social contexts.