Photovoice: Concept, Methodology, and Use for Participatory Needs Assessment

Wang, Caroline & Burris, Mary Ann. (1997). Health Education & Behavior, 24(3), 369-387.

Wang and Burris define photovoice as "a process by which people can identify, represent, and enhance their community through a specific photographic technique" (p. 369). They emphasize the advantages of photovoice as a needs assessment tool: (1) it is grounded in participatory appraisal that describes the fundamentals of the community needs; (2) Photovoice employs the visual image, a powerful means to describe such needs; (3) the accessibility of photovoice enables even illiterate people to participate; (4) it facilitates the sampling of different social and behavior setting, which may be beyond the researchers' scope; (5) it can sustain community participation. etc.

However, one of the disadvantages that photovoice method may bring is, the authors point out, that "photographs are easy to gather but difficult to analyze and summarize because they yield an abundance of complex data that can eb difficult to digest" (p. 375). Participatory analysis they propose seem to provide a possible solution to the dilemma. The authors argue that to use photovoice for needs assessment, participants should be involved in selecting topics, contextualizing the meaning of a photo, and codifying that identifies issues, themes or theories. Group discussion is critical to all these processes, the authors write. They state that the group discussion may allow VOICE--voicing our indicidual and collective experience, because photogrphs alone, considered outside the context of women's own voices and stories, would contradict the essence of photovoice.