Photovoice methods have been historically powerful in conveying community strengths and challenges, and facilitating collective group views as a means to lobbying policy change and addressing wide-ranging health inequities. Hastened by the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, the shift of data collection from in-person to online platforms has illuminated new opportunities and challenges for conducting virtual photovoice studies. Building on previous insights and drawing from our worldwide virtual photovoice study with men aged 19 to 44, this article provides project-informed acumens in discussing the case for and against virtual photovoice.
Answering the research question ‘how do men build equitable and sustainable intimate partner relationships?’, we recruited 110 men recruited from 15 countries via diverse social media platforms including Twitter and Instagram. Participants were invited to a brief intake Zoom interview prior to completing their consent and sociodemographic forms. They subsequently submitted 5 to 10 photographs that represented their experiences of, and perspectives about, equitable and sustainable intimate partner relationships via Qualtrics. Upon completing these steps, participants completed semi-structured individual photovoice interviews via Zoom, lasting an average of 79 minutes each.
Distilling our key findings, in the first theme – e-efficiencies and concessions, e-efficiencies were characterised by a wider recruitment reach that spanned across the world and cost-saving benefits conferred by virtual data collection means. These however contrasted phishing vulnerabilities and challenges with men’s diverse internet literacies and practices – both being concessions in the study. In describing theme two – participatory action changed, we revealed that virtual photovoice has provided new avenues for participants to decide what and how they would source their photographs, and allowed for increased inclusion of under-researched and hard-to-reach populations. For the latter specifically, the consideration of EDI frameworks using virtual methods can and should engage diverse participants who otherwise are routinely excluded (or othered) by racism, xenophobia and ableism. Lastly in the third theme – reckoning breadth and depth in a large dataset – we discussed the challenge of working with a large qualitative dataset. The inclusion of men worldwide complicated the usual analytics in inductively deriving patterns on men’s intimate partner relationships while considering and contextualizing their diverse sociocultural backgrounds and agency-structure interactions. That said, the large dataset did allow for opportunities to investigate diverse data subsets, illuminating depth with regards to different sub-groups in the cohort. For instance, using comparative analytics, we could compare equity views of 20 Turkish participants with a sub-sample of men from Western Canada – providing valuable insights for differentiating locale specific interactions.
In conclusion, while COVID-19 have driven the need for virtual photovoice methods, there are still complex considerations to be made, shaped by changing technologies and tilts tied to returning in-person post COVID-19. In essence, these may influence how photovoice methods may manifest moving forward- between being fully virtual, back to being in-person, or a hybrid combination of both.
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The case for and against doing virtual photovoice