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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Janice McLaughlinORCiD, Dr Edmund Coleman-Fountain
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Visual methods are a popular way of engaging children and young people in research. Their growth comes out of a desire to make research practice more appropriate and meaningful to them. The auteur approach emphasises the need to explore with young participants why they produce the images they do, so that adult researchers do not impose their own readings. This paper, while recognising the value of such visual techniques, argues that their benefit is not that they are more age appropriate, or that they are more authentic. Instead it lies in their capacity to display the social influences on how participants, of any age, represent themselves. The paper does so through discussion of an Economic and Social Research Council research project, which made use of visual and other creative methods, undertaken in the UK with disabled young people. The research involved narrative and photo elicitation interviews, the production of photo journals, and creative practice workshops aimed at making representational artefacts. Through analysing the photography, the journals and interviews the paper examines what it was research participants sought to represent and also what influenced the types of photographs they gathered and the type of person they wanted to represent. We argue that they aimed to counter negative representations of disability by presenting themselves as happy, active and independent, in doing so they drew from broader visual iconography that values certain kinds of disabled subject, while disvaluing others.
Author(s): McLaughlin J, Coleman-Fountain E
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Qualitative Research
Year: 2018
Volume: 19
Issue: 4
Pages: 363-381
Online publication date: 02/03/2018
Acceptance date: 29/01/2018
Date deposited: 29/01/2018
ISSN (print): 1468-7941
ISSN (electronic): 1741-3109
Publisher: Sage Publications Ltd.
URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794118760705
DOI: 10.1177/1468794118760705
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