Paper: Seeing Is Believing: The Credibility of Image Based Research and Evaluation

by Sandra Mathison. Images are all around us; we are all image-makers and image readers. Images are a rich source of data for understanding the social world and for representing our knowledge of that social world. Image-based research has a long history in cultural anthropology and sociology as well as the natural sciences, but is nonetheless still relatively uncommon (Collier & Collier, 1986). Images should not be romanticized, but neither should their value as data and knowledge be ridiculed or avoided. Especially in Western industrialized cultures images are often associated with artistic expression, entertainment, and persuasion. Images are seen as intuitive, representing implicit and subjective knowledge, while numeric, text and verbal data are more associated with fact, reason, and objective knowledge. Images, in fact, are no more suspect than other sort of data, such as numbers or text. Images, like any data, can be used to lie, to question, to imagine, to critique, to theorize, to mislead, to flatter, to hurt, to unite, to narrate, to explain, to teach, to represent. This paper will discuss what image based research is, what it can contribute to social research, and more particularly discuss its credibility.

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