Assessing Stock Photos for Farmworker Health and Safety Education Materials

ABSTRACT

Objectives

The aim of this study was to analyze how farmworkers are represented in stock photos available in commercial libraries for use in agricultural health and safety education materials.

Methods

We searched for images in five commercial stock photo libraries using the terms “farmworkers” and “women farmworkers” in April 2022. We used quantitative content analysis. We coded each image for containing a visible face, age, gender, skin tone, work activity, mechanization, presence of hazards, technology use, and protective equipment/clothing after establishing inter-coder reliability. We used descriptive statistics to characterize the available stock photos.

Results

We identified stock photos (n = 127) in three databases (Adobe Stock Images, Canva, and Getty Images). Two databases (Microsoft Office Image Library and Pixabay) had no relevant images at the time of the search. Only half of the photos analyzed contained a face. Light skin tones and young or middle-aged adults were more common. A majority of farming activities represented in photos were manual tasks (e.g., harvesting) with few depictions of equipment, hazards, and protective equipment/clothing.

Conclusions

Health and safety professionals tasked with developing materials for education in agricultural settings face a severe lack of imagery pertinent to the realistic conditions of farmworkers in the United States. In the databases we reviewed, photos displaying human faces, photos showing a range of skin tones and ages, and photos displaying an array of different farm hazards are likely not sufficient for material development. Health and safety professionals may benefit from sharing photos from their own work with other professionals and allocating resources for professional photo shoots in their material development projects.

KEYWORDS:

• Farmworkers
• stock photos
• material development
• health promotion
• representation

Acknowledgments

We thank Zachary Chichester for help with reliability coding.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health under award number [G08LM013198]. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.