Still Photography Provides Data for Community-Based Initiatives

Abstract

We use community psychology's accent on methodological pluralism and giving voice to the marginalised as a platform to critically examine the utility and outcome of photography as a data collection and community engagement method. Accordingly we focus on two community projects that used still photographs to identify environmental and household childhood injury risks respectively. The first project involved the visual documentation, examination and analysis of environmental threats in an informal settlement. The second project focused on the documentation and identification of selected childhood injury risks in and outside homes in an informal settlement. This study provided visual images that are detailed and complex and that allowed the researchers to acquire greater understandings than would have been possible from written texts alone. These photographs may be used to create injury risk awareness in the respective communities and among other relevant stakeholders.

Keywords:

• still photography
• community psychology
• injury risk