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Visual Studies
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The story they want to tell, and the visual story as


evidence: young people, research authority and
research purposes in the education and health
domains
Lyn Yates
Available online: 01 Dec 2010

To cite this article: Lyn Yates (2010): The story they want to tell, and the visual story as evidence: young people,
research authority and research purposes in the education and health domains, Visual Studies, 25:3, 280-291
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2010.523281

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

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

LYN YATES

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Young people and research in education and health

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 childrens 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.
Packards 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).

ISSN 1472586X printed/ISSN 14725878 online/10/030280-12 2010 International Visual Sociology Association
DOI: 10.1080/1472586X.2010.523281

Young people and research in education and health

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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 Packards 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

281

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; MarquezZenkov 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 researchers 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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L. Yates

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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 quasianthropological 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 nave 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 19912). 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

Young people and research in education and health

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.

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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

283

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 Mosss project using student camera work to show
their perspectives on their school and inclusive and noninclusive 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, Drews 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 researchers 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).

Young people and research in education and health

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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 persons 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,

285

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 peoples 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 13).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 Alices 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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286

L. Yates

(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 secondstage 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 Alices 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 Alices lack of take-up of the videocamera 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

FIGURES 13. 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.

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.

Young people and research in education and health

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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 Alices 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 (Jasmines choice). The following visit it was
again Jasmines 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 mothers
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

287

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 agerelated 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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288

L. Yates

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).

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 Alices 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 Alices 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

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).

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

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Young people and research in education and health

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 Alices 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

289

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 Childrens Hospital
Education Institute as an ARC Linkage Project
(LP0669735). The research team comprises: chief

290

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[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

L. Yates

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 Childrens
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 Childrens 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.
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.
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.
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 dont need to include
these photos if you dont 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
dont be afraid to try different things. If something
doesnt work out, dont worry, thats photography and
movie making!
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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