The heroines of their own stories: Insights from the use of life history drawings in research with a transnational migrant community

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we discuss how life history drawings can serve as a valuable method for global health research. The introduction discusses qualitative approaches to concepts such as reliability, validity and triangulation, and situates the use of participatory visual methods within the broader field of participatory research. The paper reports on an experience using life history drawings as part of extended ethnographic research in rural Mexico and among Mexican migrants living in Atlanta. The primary method for that parent project was comparative ethnographic research, which included life histories collected from 13 pairs of women over 15 months of participant observation. Early in the research, the drawings contributed to a major reorientation in the direction of the research project. The insights generated through analysis of the life history drawings exemplify how this participatory research technique can direct attention to social processes that feel salient to community members. In this case, they called attention to the enormity of social change in this community over one generation, reorienting the study from one focused on change causes by migration to one that focused on two trajectories of change: generational and migration-related.

KEYWORDS:

• Qualitative
• participatory research methods
• health
• life history drawings
• Mexico

Acknowledgements

Jennifer S. Hirsch gratefully acknowledges research assistance from Laurie Helzer, who conducted a literature review for an early draft of this paper, and from Caroline M. Parker.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The data collection for this research was supported by the Andrew Mellon Foundation through a grant to the Department of Population Dynamics at Johns Hopkins University, the National Science Foundation Programme in Cultural Anthropology (SBR-9510069) and the International Migration Programme at the Social Science Research Council. Jennifer S. Hirsch receives institutional support from the Department of Sociomedical Sciences and from the Columbia Population Research Center, which is supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R24HD058486). Morgan Philbin is supported by an NIMH postdoctoral training grant (T32 MH019139, Principal Investigator, Theodorus Sandfort, Ph.D.) at the HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Columbia University (P30-MH43520; Principal Investigator: Robert H. Remien, Ph.D.). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.