Using Drawings in Qualitative Interviews: An Introduction to the Practice

Abstract

Drawings are employed by qualitative researchers in many creative ways, and in many different contexts, and a variety of different terms are used to describe similar techniques. I present here a concise description of two basic approaches to integrating participants’ produced drawings into verbal qualitative research interviews, along with characteristic cases of empirical research demonstrating how these approaches have been applied. I also provide a list of best practices and I discuss ethical issues. It is common for qualitative researchers to mix techniques in order to creatively address real-world research challenges. The proposed categorization, augmented by the list of best practices, can help researchers to effectively integrate drawings and verbal interviews into a multimodal research project.

“In Spite of the Storm, I Saw Bright Spots”: School Counselors Experiences During COVID-19

“…Through phenomenological research, scholars aim to glean a thick, rich description of participants' lived experiences with a phenomenon (e.g., the what and how; Creswell & Poth, 2018;Hays & Singh, 2023). To deepen our understanding of participants' experiences with the pandemic, we triangulated multiple data sources consisting of individual interviews and participant drawings (Brailas, 2020;Hays & Singh, 2023). Scholars have recommended qualitative methods to glean a nuanced understanding of shared trauma and PTG, including interviews and creative methods of expression beyond the verbal, to aide in participant reflection (Holmes et al, 2021;Tosone & Cohen-Serrins, 2022;Tosone et al, 2016).…”

“…If so, please share those,” and (b) “As a school counselor, did you experience/perceive any positive experiences as a result the pandemic? If so, please share those.” At the end of the interview, we followed a postinterview approach to collecting participant drawing data, adding drawings to semistructured interviews for a richer understanding of the given phenomenon (Brailas, 2020). We provided the following prompt: “In this interview, you’ve described your experiences as a school counselor during the COVID-19 pandemic.…”

‘Talking Lines’: The Stories of Diagnosis and Support as Told by those with Lived Experience of Rarer Forms of Dementia

“…Berger (2005) states that this slowness "questions an event's appearance and in doing so it reminds us that appearances are always a construction with a history." From a methodological standpoint, drawing also provides added space for self-re ection whereby both researcher and participant might receive, access and learn about "previously untouched experiences" (Brailas, 2020). Within an interview context, this dialogue might also help to build rapport between researcher and participant, whilst offering research participants a more interactive interview experience that better articulates their stories beyond words (Emmerson & Frosh, 2004).…”

Talking Lines: A Research Protocol Integrating Verbal and Visual Narratives to Understand the Experiences of People Affected by Rarer Forms of Dementia

“…Line drawings can express both the concrete and the imaginary and provide interconnected ways of orienting knowledge about lived experience (Ashton, 2014). Increasingly, drawing has been used in qualitative research interviews with recommendations that combining visual and verbal modalities might creatively address real-world research challenges (Brailas, 2020) such as offering ways to amplify marginalised voices or reveal aspects of social connectedness (Simon et al, 2022). Some studies have used visual analysis to comprehend how people might understand illness through drawing (Guillemin, 2004) and methods such as timeline mapping have been used to see how the creation of visual timelines might inform verbal semi structured interviewing (Kolar et al, 2015).…”