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The story they want to tell, and the visual story asevidence: young people, research authority andresearch purposes in the education and healthdomainsLyn Yates

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DOI: 10.1080/1472586X.2010.523281

Visual Studies, Vol. 25, No. 3, December 2010

RVSTThe story they want to tell, and the visual story as evidence: young people, research authority and research purposes in the education and health domains

Young people and research in education and healthLYN YATES

The decision to use participatory visual methods with young people in education, health or public policy research

is linked to a desire to allow them to have some greater voice in the research and the professional activities that impact on their lives. But how that ‘voice’ is produced, whose voice it represents, and how the product of that

research is used and interpreted are all contentious issues for researchers. This article analyses some of these conceptual, methodological, political and pragmatic issues from the perspective of a current Australian Research

Council-funded project working with young people across education and health domains. It is argued that allowing or not allowing visual accounts to speak for themselves is not simply a political decision but one related to

epistemological understandings about meaning, and also to different purposes of different visual projects, in particular their relative emphasis on voice as a window to the world of the young people, compared with voice as a window to ‘who

I am’. The project discussed is one which aims to give greater authority and centrality to the visual accounts and voices of young people, but also one where researchers understand both the visual and voice as constructed rather

than given. Case studies from the project are used to illustrate the way in which these commitments frame decisions about technology and methodology, and also to show and argue for an approach which treats the meaning

of the visual evidence as something to be constructed ethnographically and reflexively over time.

In education, health and public policy research the use of

participatory visual methods with young people is usually linked to a desire to allow them to have some greater voice in the fields of research and professional activity that impact on their lives. Giving cameras or

video cameras to young people is one way of requesting their story, and their perspectives, and of producing artefacts or evidence that might carry that story powerfully in other contexts. But how that ‘voice’ is

produced, whose voice it represents, and how the product of that research is used and interpreted are all

contentious issues for researchers using participatory

visual methods. This article discusses these issues in relation to the development of an Australian research

project concerned with young people with chronic

health issues, Keeping Connected: Young People, Identity and Schooling.1

The Keeping Connected project is co-funded by an

education institute attached to a children’s hospital and a

national competitive research grant. Its focus is on young people whose lives are disrupted by chronic illness, but

issues of their educational connectedness, their social identity and their experiences of the education/health

interface are foregrounded, rather than health issues as

such. The young people involved are varied by age (in the 12-to-18 age group), by gender, by class, by location

and by illness type. Nine principal investigators from education and adolescent health backgrounds are

involved in the project, along with a number of project assistants and research associates. The project design has

a number of elements,2 but a qualitative and longitudinal

case-study approach to collaborative work with the young people, including use of visual methods, was

intended to be the central part of the project. Its intention was to invite visual stories and narrative

accounts from 31 young people whose educational lives

have been disrupted by chronic illness or serious health issues, and whose situation and needs are more

commonly framed through professional discourses of health or education, or interpreted through the voice of

their parents. This article discusses why we set out to use this approach in the way that we did, and, more

particularly, explores some issues of authority, power

and meanings that are a tension in collaborative visual projects, continuing a recent stimulating discussion in

this journal by Packard (2008) on that topic.

Packard’s collaboration was with homeless men, and his

analysis emphasises issues of power and knowledge. The current project and analysis emphasises voice,

representation and meaning, often taking up similar

Lyn Yates is Professor of Curriculum and Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research) at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and is a past president of the Australian Association for Research in Education. Lyn is author of What Does Good Education Research Look Like? Situating a Field and its Practices (Open University Press, 2004) and co-author with Julie McLeod of Making Modern Lives: Subjectivity, Schooling and Social Change (SUNY Press, 2006).

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issues to those of Packard, but based on a different kind of project and given different inflection by the emphasis on voice and identity. Where Packard’s conclusion is to find innovative means by which ways of ‘transferring power to the powerless’ can be pushed further, the argument of this article is that in projects concerned with identity and also with voice, there is a tension that should remain in play, not be resolved in one or other single direction.

I begin with some discussion of the issues at a more general level, and then draw on two of the case studies. What I want to show is that neither the politics nor the meaning-making of ‘the visual story’ are singular, and the longitudinal and linked case-study approach makes possible a revisiting and challenging of the researchers’ own initial assumptions. I also want to show that the ways in which the young people both produce and resist certain visual methods provide further insights into the identity questions we set out to investigate.

VOICE AND EMPOWERMENT

In our initial funding application, we talked of our purpose in working with young people and eliciting their visual accounts in a way that alludes to a tension that is the focus of this article (italics have been added for the purpose of this article):

The approach is twofold: aiming to elicit the story that each subject wants to tell (that is, a story that they control); and aiming to produce accounts that can be analysed by the researchers as identity stories, and as indirect as well as explicit evidence of what matters to the participants.

The italicised and underlined phrases here signal issues that differentiate stances taken by different kinds of visual and collaborative projects, issues that are about epistemology as well as politics. In many projects, the commitment is firmly to one or other of these ways of conceptualising the role of the visual representations produced by participants. In the Keeping Connected project, the two imperatives are held in tension. One clear impetus for the project was to make possible a more prominent voice for the young people, and to give them a greater authority in shaping and controlling their story. At the same time, the researchers in the project share an understanding that ‘the story that each subject wants to tell’ is never simply a straightforward given, but is something produced (and indeed co-constructed) in particular circumstances to particular ends. And this project overall has interests in identifying ‘what matters’

in this education/health context that may be ‘indirect’, not confined to the story that the participants control. So questions about what the visual accounts mean, what authority we are actually allowing to the participants within our research, and what authority we are facilitating by the ways we use their accounts as outputs of our research are not straightforward matters.

In the design of the project, for example, we wanted to encourage the young people to produce their own photographic accounts (‘the story they want to tell’) of who they were and what mattered to them, with some sense that these visual records would be more than an elicitation device to supplement interviews, but would also be a potential means of communicating directly to public or professional audiences the perspectives of these young people, a form of communication that has a different kind of power to the interpretations or accounts that researchers might produce (Moss 2008). At the same time, we did not believe any situation or task, no matter how open, could be simply neutral. We chose a longitudinal qualitative approach because we believed this facilitated relationships that could allow fuller kinds of accounts to be given; and we believed that the relationships involved in producing any accounts themselves need to be interpreted, and that meanings and narratives need to be considered over time, and recursively (McLeod 2003; Thomson and Holland 2003; Yates 2003).

In this sense, from the beginning, the Keeping Connected project recognised that ‘the story they want to tell’ is not a given, but is something elicited or produced, and contextual. But beyond that the members of the research team were somewhat conflicted about how fully the main focus was intended to be the production of ‘the story they want to tell’, and how much this was to be treated as a means to another end, ‘the visual story as evidence’, within a project whose broader purposes were decided by the researchers before any collaboration began.

For around half a century two potentially contending research imperatives have threaded through youth sociology, feminism, cultural studies and media studies. One imperative (for example, Mizen 2005; Marquez-Zenkov 2007) has been a concern about giving voice to the people who are the subjects of the research, to find ways to allow their stories to be told, to see these subjects as the authoritative interpreters of their own experiences, with the researcher’s task being essentially one of midwife, publicist and editor. Eliciting and making public the accounts is here seen as important in its own

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right, as a legitimate endpoint. Voice itself is politically important in making change possible.

Other researchers, equally politically concerned with the interests of subordinated groups, interpret power and subordination as going beyond who is heard at a particular time. These researchers may not take the participants’ own views and representations as the only or final or most powerful account of who they are or what they want or need. For example, Cohen and Ainley (2000) have argued that, traditionally, cultural studies ‘story-gathering’ has been dominated by ‘quasi-anthropological concern with exotic instances of youthful deviance and difference’. Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) have been critical of a tendency to ‘spontaneous populism’, which takes subjects’ stories as the endpoint of the research. Their insistence on a more theoretical engagement with such stories sees narratives as a form of what might once have been called ‘false consciousness’, at best as a partial constructed consciousness which itself should be the object of further investigation in order to understand social distinctions, inequalities, power. More recently, Arnot and Reay (2007, 315) argue that too much of the work on student voice in schools is producing a ‘first person narrative of description’. They caution against treating the account that is produced as an end in itself, against conflating voice and message. Researchers here understand commonsense understandings as themselves produced, as themselves artefacts, and believe the purpose of research is to produce a different picture of what is going on.

Focusing more specifically on visual accounts, Piper and Frankham argue that in the popular use of giving young people cameras as a means of eliciting their voice, ‘the crisis of representation familiar in most interpretive genres is sometimes absent from what tends to be an uncritical celebration of representation in this particular context’ (Piper and Frankham 2007, 373). Other writers, however, emphasise the value of such opportunities for young people to create their own visual accounts as an important corrective and supplement to interview methods that make naïve assumptions about the meaningfulness of a verbal answer that is elicited on the spot at one point in time (Maclure 1993; Gauntlett 2007; Moss 2008).

A number of different positions and issues have been conflated in this brief overview, but I wanted to draw attention to some issues of political/ethical intent that are commonly part of participatory projects working with groups who have been seen as silenced or seen only

through the perspective of others. In that context, ‘speaking for others’ in relation to those visual productions needs to be treated with considerable caution (Alcoff 1991–2). At the same time, the wide array of theoretical perspectives on power and representation provides a plethora of arguments which would want to take a body of visual artefacts not as speaking for itself, but rather as something that requires further interpretation and understanding of its contexts of production and realisation (Hollway and Jefferson 2000; Banks 2001; Packard 2008).

One further issue that has been raised in some recent debates is that we should give some critical attention to the upsurge of popularity of visual methods, and of seeking the ‘voice’ of young people, in relation to schooling agendas. In part, of course, this development reflects the growth in usability and cheapness of the technologies, and the fact that this is an age with more awareness of communicating via image and not just text. However, Bragg (2007, 356) argues that although an optimistic perspective on this search for ‘students as researchers’ would note the pleasure students take in becoming involved in this work, it could also be seen as a form of governmentality:

It involves more intense work on the self, requiring from students constant scrutiny and self-criticism [and] it can create new networks or relations of power, or reinforce existing ones, as it enters a field where young people are already differentiated according to age, gender, class and race.

In other words, participation in research projects in an approved form itself can create new forms of differentiating the ‘good’ subject from the less desirable ones, as well as giving more prominence to those ‘good’ subjects compared with those who do not participate in the resulting constructions of who young people ‘are’. In the project discussed in this article the rather onerous processes of gaining ethics approval via parents as well as potential participants meant that only young people with strong and relatively positive relationships with parents were part of our cohort.

In the Keeping Connected Project, the political aim of treating those without public or professional voice as subjects with something to say (‘honouring the subjects’) is an important agenda; but so too is the sociological and critical concern with revealing evidence that might show social, institutional, cultural, discursive processes that are impacting negatively on those subjects. This is not a project where the researchers accept that participatory

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action research or voice in its various guises is the only means to bring about change; but neither is it a project that is happy to jump to a Foucauldian or psycho-social form of analysis where the intentions and reactions of those in the study are of lesser interest, or of interest only because of what we, the ‘expert’ researchers, can see beyond them.

Within the tension of balancing ‘the story they want to tell’ and the visual ‘as evidence’, a further issue that it is helpful to clarify is that of different purposes or emphases of visual projects.

WINDOW TO THE WORLD OR WINDOW TO IDENTITY: OF WHAT IS THE VISUAL STORY EVIDENCE?

Projects that put cameras into the hands of young people are all interested to some degree in their acts of selection/representation and to some degree in what is being substantively conveyed in the images. However, the degree of emphasis on one or other of these purposes is a salient distinction between projects and the methodologies appropriate to them. Here we may compare projects where the visual purpose is primarily to find out or show more about things/events in the world that are the experiences of the participants (the social setting for the individual concerned, or the daily processes used to manage their medication), and projects whose central intention is to find out more about the subjectivity of the person taking the photographs (‘who they are’, ‘what matters to them’). I will call the first kind of emphasis ‘windows to the world’ projects; and the latter ‘windows to identity’.

‘Windows to the world’ projects do recognise that photograph-taking involves perspectives and selectivity by the photographer, but their central interest is to get new knowledge about the world out there as experienced by the participants – the photographer is a means, albeit a privileged means, of showing how the physical arrangements of schools look to young people with a disability, or what the home environment is of young people with asthma. ‘Windows to identity’ projects, on the other hand, are interested in the photographs primarily as a means of accessing the inner life and perspectives of the participants. In looking at what has been depicted, they are more interested in why these have been selected by the photographer, and what they mean to them.

Clearly there is some overlap, and most researchers recognise some elements of both intentions, but the significance of relative emphasis in terms of this

distinction became apparent to the research team on the

Keeping Connected project when we first embarked on

the very practical steps of considering what equipment and software we would use, and what types of analysis or

interpretive methods we would use with the visual

materials.

At the beginning of the project we considered a number

of other projects working broadly in our space and the software they had used. Our colleague David Clarke uses

videotaping extensively in studies of classroom research

(Clarke, Keitel, and Shimizu 2006; Clarke et al. 2008). These studies use sophisticated multiple videos and

high-tech software to make micro analyses of classrooms

that can simultaneously analyse teacher and student activities. These projects are clearly ‘windows to the

world’ in intent and methodology. Two other projects, closer in intent to Keeping Connected, had asked young

people with illness to produce photographs and video

accounts about it (Rich and Chalfen 1999; Rich et al. 2000, on young people with asthma; and Sawyer et al.

2007, on young people with cystic fibrosis). Both

projects had some interest both in the perspectives of the young people and in their experiences, but, I would

argue, their emphasis was more on the latter, the interest

being in accessing the world as it was experienced, and in seeing how young people manage their condition. Both

projects used some structured tasks in relation to the

visual data gathering, and some cross-case coding at a distance from the collecting of the data.

In Moss’s project using student camera work to show their perspectives on their school and inclusive and non-

inclusive spaces (Moss 2002, 2008), the purpose is more

evenly focused on identity (subjective perspective) and context (the spaces), and the approach sees the visual as

representing the voice as well as adding to it. Other

projects again are more centrally interested in the inner lives of participants. These projects often use visual

methods such as photo-elicitation or video diaries and

interviews as one component in projects using extensive reflexive dialogue between artefacts and theories (e.g.

Walkerdine, Lucey, and Melody 2001). Some earlier

projects by members of this research team took this form – for example, Drew’s doctoral project on identities of

young survivors of cancer (Drew 2003); and Yates’

earlier project (with McLeod) where videotaped interviews in a longitudinal project allowed significant

revisiting of prospective and retrospective lenses on

identities (McLeod and Yates 2006).

The more the focus of the project is on what is being

depicted about experiences or the world, the more

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methods that analyse through ‘objective’ methods such as forms of content analysis detached from context of elicitation can be brought into play. The more the focus is on reading identity through what has been selected or depicted, the more a reflexive and interpretive methodology is required that can justify the imputation of meaning in relation to particular artefacts or evidence.

In the Keeping Connected project our focus in relation to the photographic components is less on ‘window to the world’ than on ‘window to identity’; and our interest in the latter has retrospective as well as prospective and synchronous elements. As a result, this project approached involvement with participants as a kind of multi-site case study or ethnography. We see as important the researcher’s entry to and interpretation of the setting and the conditions in which stories, both visual and oral, are elicited; and value the longitudinal form of study which allows repeated encounters with each participant by the same researcher, and in which visual artefacts could be revisited at different distances to discuss further the intentions and meanings they represented (McLeod 2003; Thomson and Holland 2003; Yates 2003). For this reason, in this project the chief investigators do the fieldwork themselves, and reflexively analyse and develop their visits and interpretations. They do not sub-contract the interactions to research assistants, or use forms of content analysis that remove the contextual elements. The build-up of the bigger picture across the study is based on dialogue, sharing and challenging between researchers who have first-hand knowledge of their own studies, as well as an opportunity to see what has been produced by others, and what is being interpreted by others.

The approach we decided on here counters criticism made by Piper and Frankham (2007, 385) that ‘photographs, because of their mimetic quality, encourage us to tell singular truths about them, in contrast to interview transcripts where people move unconsciously between positions, writing and re-writing themselves as they talk’. Gauntlett and Holzwarth (2006) argue that a value of visual methods is their ability to enhance a reflective process over time, and in the Keeping Connected study both researchers and participants have opportunities to revisit photographs or to compare ones that were produced at different times over the two to three years. MacDonald and Greggans (2008), in another study researching young people and their families in relation to nursing, also argue that the ‘chaos and complexity’ of homes requires a ‘flexible’ rather than a

pre-structured approach when interviewing young people there.

A further perspective on the interaction of project purposes, participant expectations and visual technologies in this project came with our invitation to participants in the second round of visits to use video cameras. We had found that the young people themselves were quite technically literate in terms of using still and video cameras and mobile phones, and that one of the attractions for them to participate in the project had been the use of these methods rather than just interviews or surveys. But although most of the participants initially said they would like to use a video camera in the second stage of the project, almost all ended up not using the video camera they were given or not finding it satisfactory if they did. Although we did give some suggestions about what might be videotaped – for example, interviews with friends or family, or reversing that and having a friend interview them, or doing a video diary – only a couple of participants took up this option. This may indicate that video use needs much more scaffolding than simply giving some possibilities and open choices; or it may indicate cultural norms (differences between, say, Australia and the United States in the extent to which people find it easy to talk about themselves). But the reaction may also reflect a more fundamental issue in relation to the fit of this technology with the project purposes – namely, that this is a project about ‘what matters’ (identity) more than about ‘what happens’, and, at least as these young people perceived it, photographs which give more obvious opportunities for selection and framing may work better for that purpose.

VISUAL DATA: METHODS, MEANINGS, ANALYTIC MOVES

Both the question of whose voice is represented in the visual accounts, and in what sense these are ‘the story the young people want to tell’ need interpretation. In this section of the article I draw on two case studies to show how these issues are far from clear-cut, and the ways in this project in which we try to work reflexively with the visual data. As a historian by initial training, I believe that while studies of how designated groups may behave in general in their photograph taking (such as Sharples et al. 2003), and the literature of cultural studies more broadly, are useful as background, imputing meanings to the artefacts needs to be justified discursively, in dialogue with the particular evidence and other studies, and not derived from a single theoretical lens or technology (Yates 2003).

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Whose Voice?

The plan with each participant (after they and their parents had indicated willingness to participate) was that the first visit to them would be at home, to talk briefly about the project, to complete the required consent forms from both parent and young person, and to leave with them the camera and a tip sheet, ‘Your experiences in pictures’. We decided not to give instructions about how many photographs they should take (we used digital cameras rather than disposable ones), and as far as possible to avoid leading their responses. Following that initial meeting, we would come back in two to three weeks to download the photographs, give them a copy and talk to them about what they had chosen to photograph. Over the next two to three years, we would visit them again at intervals to ask for further accounts of what was happening in their lives and their perspectives on what mattered to them in the education/health context, and to revisit and fill out or revise their initial accounts and photographs, using whatever means they chose. As the project progressed we were forced to re-think two of our initial design principles: the issue of ‘non-leading’ instructions; and the issue of avoiding contamination of the young person’s perspective and involvement by banishing the parents’ perspectives and involvement.

Our original thinking had been that it would be a constraint on participants to speak freely if a parent was there, and that we would discourage them from discussing in advance with their parents the approaches they took to the visual tasks. In fact we found that across well over half of our study, and across different researchers, neither the young person (and these are teenagers) nor the parent saw this as a natural or appropriate way to proceed. This is even more intriguing given that one of our team has been involved in a previous project3 concerning young people with serious health issues where they were interviewed alone, and she was involved in designing our initial protocols for this project. Yet she too has discovered the same pattern – that generally it has been hard in the home to avoid interviewing in a family area with others present. It may be that our deliberately more ethnographic style invites that kind of reaction.

Of course, when they take photographs, young people are inevitably influenced, to different degrees, by parents, friends and family, as well as by how they see the researcher and their purposes (Sharples et al. 2003). And they are also influenced by broader social norms about what is appropriate (Holliday 2007). But in this study the degree of ongoing involvement by many mothers,

notwithstanding our setting up of the study to emphasise that it was the young people themselves we wanted to work with, was unexpected, and says something about relations that develop with the particular group in our project – young people with an ongoing health condition.

One of the participants I am working with is Alice (a pseudonym), aged 12 when I first met her. For this project we had not wanted to go in with predetermined views about the young people’s illness and how it might have affected them, because we wanted to hear through their own perspective how large it loomed in their lives. Alice was enthusiastic about participating in a project using cameras, and in the first round of visits took over 80 photographs, demonstrating in the process a strong aesthetic eye (see Figures 1–3).4

Almost all the photographs Alice took were of people, including a few where she had got people to take photographs of herself in various active settings (including going to a fair, going to camp and playing the guitar), along with a few strikingly framed and dramatic shots of buildings and places. A lot of the people shown were family and church friends, but Alice had also taken the camera on a camp and had taken a lot of photographs of teachers and other students. The impression I had talking to her about the photographs was that she loved the activity in itself, but had also used it positively and deliberately to generate interactions with people at school or camp she might not otherwise be involved with. So a methodology that used coding by an ‘objective’ research assistant of who is represented in the photographs would not be a good guide to who matters in her Alice’s life – from the debrief, some seemed to be close friends, and some she could not even name. In only three of over 45 photographs featuring people other than Alice did the same person appear more than once.

But the photographs in conjunction with the narrative do tell us something about who Alice is and how she wants to be seen by the project. In person, Alice has a slight speech impediment, and looks younger than she does in the photographs – the photographs show a photogenic person playing guitar and soccer and going on various outings, and involved with a wide array of different people.

This impression that this is the story that Alice wants to tell me and the project was confirmed in the second cycle of visits. In that, we invited participants to use either video camera or still camera or some other means

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(collage, for example), and to focus more specifically on school and good and bad experiences of this. Alice was enthusiastic to use the video, and was technologically adept, but in the end found it was not something she liked, and she took only a few minutes of footage of some friends. Two things seemed to shape that preference. She was interested in the aesthetic design possibilities of framing photographs, and in her discussion of the initial photographs talked about ones she considered better and worse in terms of their aesthetic or technical features, rather than in terms of what was being depicted. So her choices about method and her preferences for different equipment say something about who she is and what matters to her. The second issue is that she clearly did not want to talk about or acknowledge any health issues or any negatives in her life or her schooling – each time I tried even lightly touching on any of this in our conversations she clammed up. Making a video diary in which she talked to the camera about her day did not appeal. So again, we might say that ‘the story she wanted to tell’ about herself was reasonably deliberate: she wanted to be seen as someone lively, active, with lots of friends and family, and having a good life. This is her story, and in many ways one might say it is a conventional story. Taking photographs of friends is a norm for young people of this age, and was the most common type of photograph produced across the studies as a whole – and previous research has found that a discourse of wanting to be seen as normal is one of the strongest tropes among people with chronic illness and their families (Robinson 1993; Atkin and Waqar 2001; Wise 2002).

But the story acquires extra dimensions if we take account of comments her mother makes and volunteers to me – sometimes with Alice present and sometimes not. Her mother seems to keep a fairly close eye on things, including warning Alice about not taking the camera to school, and being conscious of privacy issues when she takes photographs – but I do not sense any tension between the two. At the beginning of the second-stage visits, Alice again appears very positive and happy, and eager to get hold of the video camera. However, brief comments made by her mother when I was arranging the visit indicated that Alice was facing some serious health problems and will soon have to go into hospital again. Her mother also indicates that Alice’s first involvement with the hospital was in part a result of other students at school being nasty to her. This may be a third possible explanation of Alice’s lack of take-up of the video-camera option. In longitudinal perspective, as I will discuss below, the year in which we invited her to use that camera was not one where her relationship with

school and friends was in a good state. She was able to use the still camera to invite some interactions and take lots of quick photographs (including of people whose names she did not know), but to ask others to become involved in a more complicated video camera encounter at that point might have been too forbidding.

FIGURES 1–3. These three photographs were taken by Alice as part of the request to show ‘your experiences in pictures’ at beginning of the project, in September 2007.

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So using further information supplied by her mother, the issue of the story Alice has selected to tell has an even stronger resonance in the context of the story she has decided not to tell me. But the more we begin to interpret Alice’s account in terms of what she is not doing, the more we begin overlaying an ‘expert’ story and other voices about who she is over the ‘story she wants to tell’. I will return to this later in discussing the second series of photographs which Alice produced towards the second year of the study.

In the case of another participant I am working with, Jasmine, I initially found myself frustrated, being set up each time to do the interview in a noisy room with the mother, the brother, the family dog and the television all competing for attention, and interjecting at various points. I guessed that Jasmine (aged 17) would have been happier to be away from there to talk more privately but could not negotiate that, and nor could I. In negotiating participation in the project, her mother had been particularly protective, and concerned about Jasmine not being exposed in public forums online, and had asked many questions about the project. However, when I came back for a later visit, and found that Jasmine had forgotten the arrangement, her mother was apologetic and phoned her daughter so that I could meet her at the local shopping centre. I went there and interviewed her with her friend sitting by (Jasmine’s choice). The following visit it was again Jasmine’s choice to meet at home, and again her mother took an active part in the interview. But Jasmine seemed very happy to be pushed and prompted to tell various other aspects of her story, and her mother’s interjections seemed to inspire Jasmine to talk much more freely than she had with me at the shopping centre.

In other words, it is not that the account produced in a solo interview with a researcher is necessarily truer or fuller than any other account (Maclure 1993). Jasmine talked more freely, and seemed more comfortable, when at home with her mother and a lot of activity present than when either there was a friend present or she was with me alone. At the same time, although Jasmine took a large number of photographs, including multiple photographs of the family dog, and of her room (which I was never invited into when I visited the home), she had not included photographs of her mother or family, but rather multiple photographs of her friends and herself on a day out in the city. She chose to present one set of pictures as the story of who she was; she showed another aspect of who she was in the encounters we had. In later interviews, she did confirm both directly and indirectly how important her family and particularly her mother were to her. But her photograph story was her projected

identity of herself in the world: a fashionable and

somewhat rebellious teenager out on the town and

messing around with her best friend.

Across the project, the question of whose story or which story the collections of photographs represent is one that

requires interpretation. The sets of photographs of

friends, activities and celebrations that were so pervasive

across those produced by all the young people in our study of course draw on widespread cultural and age-

related norms (Sharples et al. 2003) about appropriate

subjects for photographs. As well, from my encounters

with both Alice and Jasmine, I am fairly sure that any invitations we give to produce photographs, no matter

how open, and no matter how much we want it to be

their own choice, will be discussed with their mothers,

and will be subject to some prodding and restriction from their mothers. A similar point might be made

about the cues given unwittingly by the researchers, or

the different experiences of the participants with other

school or television projects. These can incite the participant to produce ‘more creative’ artefacts; or

symbolic rather than representational ones. One

interesting aspect of our project is that we can look at,

and see hints of, this in comparing the kinds of artefacts and data produced by the participants working with

different researchers.

What Meaning?

Some kinds of analysis of visual material can be relatively

factual and objective: How many photographs did they choose to produce? How many people and which people

were included? But the more important issue for this

project is not simply ‘what is depicted?’ but ‘what is its

meaning?’ and ‘what is its significance?’ That is why we have taken a broadly ethnographic approach to this

material, and see the visits and interviews as inherently

linked to the meaning of the visual material. The

longitudinal element of the study is also important: what people are prepared to say at a distance can be different

from what they will say immediately.

The brief discussion of Alice earlier shows some of the

ways visual and narrative are interpreted in dialogue

with each other. From the photographs alone, we could

say that she produced a very large number of them, and that the great majority contained either other people, or

Alice doing something interesting and active. But it is

from her commentary that I interpret that some of the

photographs were about using the camera to interact with teachers and people at school, people she

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acknowledges she does not know well or does not know their name. I make other interpretations from how she has chosen to depict herself (visits to camp, to the city, to a show) and what she has chosen not to include (visits to hospital). And another interpretation (her aesthetic skill with the camera and interest in aesthetics) was made initially on the basis of my own reading of the photographs, then confirmed for me by comments she made about different photographs. But we then move to some cross-case and cross-researcher discussion of our various interpretations. Are Alice’s accounts showing great optimism and resilience, or is the illness too confronting to want to talk about? Are photographs of friends taken unthinkingly because this is what you do with a camera? Are photographs chosen (consciously or unconsciously) as the story they want the researcher to see, or rather less self-consciously, just trying to do what they think is the task?

I would argue that the photographs that were produced were not narrowly the result of our advice sheet, which was as open-ended as we could make it, but that their meaning is not singular, and requires recursive interpretation and attention to evidence. In Alice’s case, for example, the story she tells me about photographs she took at the beginning of the study and that she tells me about those she took two years later are relatively similar: it is of herself, friends and family doing things that are fun. But while she never directly acknowledges that she was not happy prior to and in the first phase of the study, in the final interview she talks at length about the way this second year has been different and the best ever because of a particular programme that the school has instituted. Going back to the photographs with that knowledge, one can also distinguish in the photograph

sets from each period some differences in how Alice herself appears. In the first she is alone, posed, and taken in situations where it would be a member of the family holding the camera (Figure 4). In the later ones, there is a visual record of Alice as participant rather than onlooker in activities and when messing around with friends (Figure 5).5

THE VISUAL STORY THEY WANT TO TELL AND THE VISUAL STORY AS EVIDENCE

Asking young people to produce photographs for the purposes of a research project inevitably involves some difficult questions about the imputed meaning and power of that activity and the uses of the visual artefacts that are produced. In this article I explored and attempted to clarify and illustrate two particular dynamics that are inherent in projects of this kind: one relates to the dual properties of photographs as produced, but also a concrete product; and the other relates to epistemology and politics and the extent to which the young person is seen as the final or sole authority on what matters to them. I argued that a longitudinal and reflexive ethnographic methodology is a useful means of keeping in play and in tension some different legitimate concerns of projects with young people and photographs.

One dynamic I explored is that of purpose – why we want to use photographs in this kind of research, what we want to use them for, what we think they can show. It is appropriate I think to see this as an inherent dynamic rather than just simply a decision by different research projects, in that whatever the research project purposes, the photographs that are produced all represent some

FIGURE 4. Photograph of Alice taken at her request by a member of her family, as part of the September 2007 portfolio when she was in her first year of high school (year 7 in Australia).

FIGURE 5. Photograph of Alice taken at her request by a school friend in September 2009 when she was at a school camp in her third year of high school (year 9 in Australia).

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Young people and research in education and health 289

aspects of subjectivity, in that they are intentional, creative, selectively produced artefacts, an act rather than a given; and they all also are objects that show things ‘out there’ in the world of the photographer. That is, sets of photographs taken by young people are always in some sense ‘windows to identity’ and also in some sense ‘windows to the world’. Nevertheless, different projects, even in the same space (e.g. of young people with chronic health conditions; or on inclusive education), may legitimately have quite different degrees of emphasis on one or other of these elements. Some projects want to use the photographs to see the context or the practices – the conditions of a home or a school, or the family members surrounding the young person – and there are elements of this which can be allowed to some extent to speak for themselves to other audiences, or which can be analysed by external coders for what is present in those photographs. But in the case of the project I discussed in this article, the emphasis was on identity: who these young people were, what mattered to them. With projects of this kind, the value of doing ‘objective’ forms of content analysis is minimal. There is more interest in why a particular photograph has been taken than in its latent content. Here reflexive and ethnographic methods are appropriate.

Clarifying the balance of intended project purposes in relation to the photographs is helpful in identifying appropriateness of methodology and even software needs. Nevertheless, it is finally a dynamic rather than an ‘either/or’. The example of Alice’s photographs in this article was used to illustrate the interpretive processes that came into play at different stages of the project, including ways in which the photograph content itself could be used as evidence in its own right by the researcher, either in dialogue with or to set against and strengthen interpretations of talk and silences in the interviews. In two different phases of photograph-taking Alice produced large numbers of photographs of herself and of a large number of friends, and with, arguably, similar intentions. However, the interactions revealed in those two sets of photographs show too what had changed in the contexts and relationships she was photographing.

The second dynamic with which this article has been concerned is the problem of ‘whose voice’ is represented in the photographs and in the research findings using the photographs. An important intention of inviting young people to produce their visual accounts is to give their voice more prominence in research on the education and health domain, and a clear intention of the Keeping Connected project was to respect and honour ‘the story

they want to tell’. But what they want to tell does not

speak for itself, and is not singular. The photographs are produced in particular contexts for particular purposes. The ‘story they want to tell’ is different when considered

as a one-off (in relation to one set of photographs), compared with when considered as a story over time, not just because more talk and photographs are produced,

but because the first set of photographs itself begins to be seen in new ways. And analysing what matters to these young people involves considerations and knowledge on

the part of the researchers that are not able to be equally held by those producing the photographs.

Using the case studies of Alice and Jasmine, I tried to

show how the ‘story they want to tell’ was a continuing question for the researcher through the longitudinal project, not something resolved by an initial set of

photographs. At the same time, the commitment of the project to honour their voice and their own intentions in relation to the photographic story was also of continuing

concern. Using the photographs as one strand of evidence within a larger project, as evidence for vulnerabilities as well as for the positive story, was

important and relevant to our broader purposes. It understands marginalisation and lack of power as going

beyond issues of voice and representation. But finding ways to honour the clear intention of the young people to be visible and to be heard in particular ways, and to

show themselves as active, attractive and ‘normal’, was also important. These dynamics need to be kept in play.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author acknowledges funding support for the project A Multi-disciplinary Investigation of How Trauma and Chronic Illness Impact on Schooling,

Identity and Social Connectivity from the Australian Research Council and the RCH Education Institute and her appreciation for the participation and contribution

made by ‘Alice’ and ‘Jasmine’ and their families. The article draws on and has benefited from many conversations with other members of the project team:

Julianne Moss, Sarah Drew, Julie White, Trevor Hay, Peter Ferguson, Pam St Leger, Mary Dixon, Lyndal Bond, Margaret Robertson, Tony Potas, Julie Green

and Hannah Walker.

NOTES

[1] The project is co-funded by the Australian Research

Council and the Melbourne Royal Children’s Hospital

Education Institute as an ARC Linkage Project

(LP0669735). The research team comprises: chief

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investigators Lyn Yates, Julianne Moss, Trevor Hay,

Pam St Leger, Peter Ferguson (all from Melbourne

Graduate School of Education (MGSE), University of

Melbourne); Sarah Drew (Centre for Adolescent Health

(CAH), University of Melbourne/Royal Children’s

Hospital); Julie White (La Trobe University), Mary

Dixon (Deakin University); Lyndal Bond (Social and

Health Sciences Unit, Glasgow); partner research

associates Julie Green, Tony Potas and Margaret

Robertson (Royal Children’s Hospital Education

Institute); project research associates Hannah Walker,

Ria Hanewald and Katie Wright (MGSE); and Amy

Basile (CAH). The project website is: http://

www.edfac.unimelb.edu.au/keepingconnected.

[2] Other parts of the project include background review of

databases relating to the education institute and its

clients; a survey of the overall cohort; retrospective

interviews with previous clients of the education

institute, now in their twenties; interviews with parents

and education and health professionals; and an ongoing

reflexive attention to the disciplinary differences

members of the research team bring to their

interpretations.

[3] Personal communication from Dr Sarah Drew, who has

also worked on a number of projects with the Centre for

Adolescent Health as well as on her doctoral project on

young people with cancer (Drew 2003). See also

Guillemin and Drew 2010.

[4] The only instructions about content in the ‘tip sheet’ said

this: ‘We would like the photos to relate to you and

important everyday experiences, including school and

living with an ongoing health condition in some way. [. . .]

The points listed below are some general things you

might like to take photos of. You don’t need to include

these photos if you don’t want to. (Meaningful people or

places/Being at school or home/Visits to doctors or the

hospital or other health care appointments/Activities or

items from daily life/Spending time with classmates or

friends/Out of school activities & hobbies/Anything else

you think is important.) If you feel like being creative –

don’t be afraid to try different things. If something

doesn’t work out, don’t worry, that’s photography and

movie making!’

[5] Because we do not have permission to publish from

others depicted in photographs, I have restricted these

photographs from a school camp to one where Alice is

the subject.

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