A Novice's Response Letter to AAVI: Staring at an Image

Abstract

Students are often taught that quantitative analysis is about numbers while qualitative research is about language. Other types of content from these two alternatives, such as visual images, makes research analysis difficult, confusing, or even disorienting. Consequently, an initiate to learning qualitative research may be both eager and confident, but at the same time hesitant to work with images as they remain an undefined terrain. Choosing the unknown implies discomfort (Skukauskaite, Noske & Gonzales, 2018). Opting for a research method that deviates from more conventional analytical approaches can be scary. Consequently, it feels safer to use visual material when they adhere to the linguistic conventions of qualitative research and constrain the use of images solely to support narrative findings. Visual images can easily support traditional qualitative concepts of research. Afterall, as the adage goes, a picture – and visual material more broadly is worth a thousand words. There is an increasing interest from researchers in a variety of different disciplines to use images as data. They have certain advantages, especially for participatory types of research where participants are asked to create their own the images, as these images can assist both researchers and participants in “structuring, assessing or explaining their thoughts” (Clark, 2017, p.197). Hence, it would make sense that visual analysis is most suited to certain research questions that use visual materials as a prompt for interviewing or a method to document concrete artifacts that can be immediately discovered and seen. However, in addition to the functions of linguistic elaboration and notation, visual material holds an intrinsic meaning that goes beyond what can be immediately verbally expressed. As depicted in Figure 1, it is often difficult to know how to get started on this next level of visual research for the novice social science researcher, especially without an extensive training in art on how to read visual images. Where does one begin? The Analytical Apparatus for Visual Imagery (AAVI) proposed here by Hannes & Siegesmund encourages us to think about how to best grasp the meaning of visual material that is not immediately linguistically obvious. This necessitates understanding