Research Quality in Participatory Visual Research

This chapter addresses the question, ‘what is quality in participatory visual research’? The chapter opens by briefly addressing how quality has been assessed within the major paradigms of qualitative research, followed by a more detailed overview of how quality is characterised in contemporary participatory qualitative research. The chapter then turns to the unique quality demands of visual methods that encompass both still and moving images – generated and analysed using participatory research principles, by participants and/or researchers. The chapter explains how quality in visual participatory research is inherently relational and contextual at all stages of the research process. Drawing on more-than-representational approaches to the visual, the chapter will detail how quality parameters are shaped by a multitude of factors: the roles and relationships of participants and researchers over time; the interests of those involved, and the emancipatory ethos of participatory research, as a means of promoting social change and social justice. The chapter concludes with specifying quality as having multivariate attributes, describing it in terms of its foundational features, relating it back to the broader debate over quality in qualitative research.