Interpretive visual inquiry - methodological review

• Published in: Journal of psychiatric and mental health nursing Vol. 22; no. 3; pp. 219 - 221
• Main Author: Pollard, C. L. W.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.04.2015; Wiley Subscription Services, Inc
• Subjects: Humans; Imagination; Nursing; Nursing Research - methods; Psychiatric Nursing - methods; Visual Perception
• ISSN: 1351-0126; 1365-2850
• DOI: 10.1111/jpm.12172

The aim of this paper is to introduce the reader to and excite them about using interpretive visual inquiry methods in nursing research and in particular mental health nursing research. Nurse historians have long used images as a data source in their research. It is only recently that other nursing researchers have started to use images as a primary data source to answer their research questions. Nursing researchers have typically investigated images via content analysis; for example, de Carlo (2007) investigated how American film portrayed psychiatric nursing within a hospital, and Kalisch & Kalisch (1983) and Kalisch et?al. (1980) determined how nurses were depicted in the media. Alternatively, discourse analysis has been used to analyse how nursing identity was constructed on YouTube (Kelly et?al. 2012). Other nursing researchers have used images to facilitate data collection. For example, Young et?al. (2013) gave senior nursing students and preceptors digital cameras; the images were subsequently used as a medium to facilitate discussion with research participants. This use of images is more common in nursing research than using the images as a 'stand alone' data source. References