What is it about?
Researchers sometimes ask the people that they interview to draw or create diagrams to help them explain their experiences. For example, a timeline diagram can show how things change over time, or visuals using boxes, arrows and lines can be used to represent relationships between people. Diagrams can often help people to look at and think about their experiences in a new way. This paper discusses how diagrams have been used in research interviews, and how researchers can choose a diagram that fits their research topic.
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Why is it important?
The article describes how diagrams relate to people's day-to-day experiences, and makes suggestions about how to choose a diagram to suit a research topic.
Perspectives
We'd worked on several research projects using visuals to help people explain their experiences, and it seemed clear that some kinds of diagram work better than others in relation to particular research topics. When we chose which visual methods to use for different projects, there didn't seem to be any advice out there about how the mechanics of diagrams related to particular types of experiences in day-to-day life. We felt we should have a look at how lots of other researchers had used diagrams, and work out some ideas that would help us choose what kind of diagram to use, depending on the research questions we wanted to ask, and we hope this might be helpful to other researchers and provoke some debate, too.
Dr Alison Bravington
Hull York Medical School
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Putting graphic elicitation into practice: tools and typologies for the use of participant-led diagrams in qualitative research interviews, Qualitative Research, June 2018, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1468794118781718.
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