Photography as a Tool for Understanding Youth Connections to Their Neighborhood

This United States-based study examines the use of youth photography as a research method by comparing the results of a community photography project to standardised questionnaire results evaluating youth/community relationship. As stated in the research, "[r]ecently, interest in photography as a tool for research and action has gained new energy under the rubric of photovoice.” The authors found evidence that participation in photovoice projects strengthens youth relationships to their communities and attemped to compare that evidence to evidence from other research tools.

From the abstract:


"The purpose of this study was to compare photographic and questionnaire-based approaches to examining youths’ relationships with their communities. Thirty youth living in an urban neighborhood developed a collection of photographs depicting connections to their community. Youth also completed the Neighborhood Youth Inventory, the Collective Efficacy scale, and the Sense of Community Index, and were interviewed. A method of assigning ratings to the youths’ photographs that combined their own ratings with independent ratings by social scientists resulted in a measure that correlated significantly with questionnaire-based measures. This article discusses and illustrates the results through a case study, and identifies the advantages and disadvantages of each method as a tool for understanding neighborhood connections."


The youth perspective on the differences between a questionnaire format and a photographic research approach to measurement of their relationship to their communities suggest that they found the questionnaires more comprehensive, but lacking in certain categories, e.g., transportation, nature, playgrounds, and small businesses. They criticised this method as constraining. They criticised the photography method because some photos that they felt were critical did no develop well and other photos lacked key people in the community because of the release forms needed for photographing subjects (which was reported to engender suspicion among adults toward youth in the project). The youth also feared that the photos would be misinterpreted or misunderstood.


The researchers found that their attempt to code the youth photos to compare scores with the questionnaires they administered did not yield strong correlations. However, "[w]hen researchers weighted youth ratings of their photographs based on the photograph’s relevance to social connectedness, photography scores correlated significantly with total scores on both the Sense of Community Index and the Collective Efficacy measure."

In conclusion, the authors commented that, beyond the correlation with existing methods, youth photography can both provide researchers with insight "into the unseen perspectives of community insiders", and it also has the potential to spur action as well as research by altering the photographer's relationship with the surroundings.