Images are all around us; we are all image-makers and image readers. Images are a rich source of data for understanding the social world and for representing our knowledge of that social world. Image-based research has a long history in cultural anthropology and sociology as well as the natural sciences, but is nonetheless still relatively uncommon.
This chapter, Seeing is Believing, describes imaged based research and evaluation and focuses especially on issues of credibility of images and image based inquiry strategies.
There are a few examples in this chapter from my research on the impact of high stakes testing. Data collection focusing on kids’ experiences of testing involved drawing and writing. You can see more of these data on my website, as well as view a presentation I did on this topic for the Claremont Graduate School 2006 summer institute on the credibility of evidence.
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The drawings by the students from Hemlock and Cherry Grove communicate volumes about student-teacher relationships, imho, much more than you would likely extract from interviews. Powerful data indeed.