Visual Images as Data Within Qualitative Research

Visual Images as Data

Photographic images constitute an ever-present visual spectacle in contemporary society. The impact images have in society is remarkable and contributes daily to people’s interactions with fellow citizens. The prominence that images play in modern-day life is important to some visual cultural researchers who claim images of every sort dominate people’s lives and that everything seems to be about the image. Looking deeper into this phenomenon, communication and cultural theorist Sut Jhally explains that our image-based culture thrives within advertising and other mass media, but it also dominates social media. For example, the medium of print advertising (newspapers, magazines, and collateral materials) every day publishes impressions of a contemporary social structure by using visual rhetoric to persuade viewers with its underlying ideology of consumerism. Furthermore, Jhally points to this construct as defining how modern culture conceives the “good life” and society’s attempt to enact such a life based on visual models provided in the media. Visual images therefore play a significant role in this social construct, and more so in the representation of individuals or groups, such as stereotyping race, gender, or ethnicity. In addition, Jhally situates reality as being socially constructed and thus contemporary society tends to comprehend itself through visual images and their usage. He even goes so far as to suggest images have become the prevailing language that crosses national borders around the globe. This phenomenon of images is pervasive, or as visual anthropologist Marcus Banks suggests, visual images are ever-present and appear or can be found everywhere in our culture, and as such, this phenomenon is sparking new, emergent fields of inquiry such as visual culture.

Banks goes on to explain there are two primary reasons for using images (still and moving) in qualitative research. First is that images abound within Western society. Since he acknowledges their ubiquity in contemporary culture, visual images can be included in nearly all types of social scientific research. In other words, images are not restricted to the anthropologist or sociologist conducting an ethnographic study, but they are also viable for social researchers within areas such as communication, cultural, or media studies. In addition, visual images as data will find fertile soil for visual analyses within overarching paradigms such as critical theory, postmodernism, or feminism. Last, according to British cultural geography professor Gillian Rose, semiotics, psychoanalysis, discourse analysis, compositional interpretation, audience studies, documentary studies, and photo-elicitation also provide rich avenues for visual image usage and analysis.

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