The ‘anti-Instagram’: Using visual methods to study the college experiences of underrepresented students

Abstract

Seventy-four students from underrepresented groups portrayed their first-semester college experience through privately-shared, captioned Instagram photos elicited by text message prompts. Longitudinal study analysis investigates the feasibility of this innovative visual data collection method, characterises the content of photos, and compares visual evidence to audio-diary data from the same students. The method succeeded in revealing detailed longitudinal accounts of students’ transition into college. Descriptive captions allowed participants to interpret their own images without the need for interviews, centring power with the student rather than the researcher. As compared with photo elicitation, collecting captioned images offers a more manageable, cost-effective way of collecting longitudinal data from relatively large, geographically dispersed samples. High response rates suggest that a familiar social media format like Instagram is a good fit for young adults and a promising approach for recruiting and retaining low-income, first-generation, and racially underrepresented minority students in research studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

[1] All participant names are pseudonyms. We used student-chosen names for participants who responded to an emailed invitation to choose their own pseudonyms and assigned our choice of pseudonym to those who did not respond.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Bloomberg Foundation (Grant ID#38 187).

Notes on contributors

Karen D. Arnold

Karen Arnold is Professor of Higher Education at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. Arnold studies the connections between education and adult life. Her research follows ‘best case’ groups of students across the transitions from high school to college to career: high school valedictorians, Rhodes Scholars, and low income students of colour from innovative high schools. Arnold’s work centres on the ways in which individual, organisational, and social factors come together to perpetuate inequality in individuals’ educational opportunities, higher education experiences, and subsequent life chances. Arnold also studies educational conditions and interventions designed to advance human development and social equality. Her practice-oriented work takes place in community-based college access organisations in the U.S. and at universities in China and elsewhere around the world.

Ishara Casellas Connors

Ishara Casellas Connors is the Assistant Dean for Diversity and Climate at Texas A&M University, College of Geosciences. Casellas Connors is interested in research related to diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education. Particularly, the ways in which federal, state, institutional policies and actors can push against or perpetuate inequality. Additionally, she is interested in how these policies are enacted by institutional leaders and experienced by students within higher education institutions.