Abstract
In this chapter we discuss how Instagram can be employed as a tool through which researchers may gather visual data during participant-led field studies, as well as how the images available from such platforms usefully shed light on the everydayness and materiality of working life. Indeed, social media is now an established, growing and ever-advancing technological revolution and one, therefore, visual researchers need to keep pace with. Here, we consider the pragmatic elements of using Instagram in a research study, including data collection, the complexities of participants’ attitudes to social media and how these might impact researchers’ work. We also suggest analytical techniques to make sense of Instagram posts as visual data and consider the ethical issues and challenges of this emerging kind of research. In order to illustrate these elements, we draw on our own research practice—a field study, exploring the post-occupancy evaluation of a UK Business School building. The use of Instagram was part of the research design in this study and we hope our reflections and guidance in this chapter will enable readers to make practical and well-informed methodological choices when considering the use of social media for their own research studies.
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Notes
- 1.
A hashtag is an identifying label that a social media user can append to their post in order to associate it with a particular topic, concept or social movement. It is then possible for other users (and curious researchers!) to call up all the posts that have been labelled with a particular hashtag in order to see them as a collection (see Laestadius 2017).
- 2.
To encourage people to pick them up and engage, the postcards were designed to be coloured in, as shown in Fig. 1.
- 3.
The detail of this is largely beyond the scope of this chapter, but to summarise here there was an element of ‘survey fatigue’ apparent—staff in particular had been repeatedly canvassed on their views of the space and were tired of providing more thoughts and feelings. Secondly, organizational politics were at play in people’s (mistaken!) assumptions that they could only post positive views of the space, and so they appeared to post nothing at all.
- 4.
Here we are not suggesting there is a truth or ‘reality’ to images independent of the viewer, but merely that we try to ‘unsee’ as much of the aesthetic convention of our visual culture as possible—surely an impossible task but one akin to the psychodynamic technique of ‘association’ rather than sense-making (Warren 2012).
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Acknowledgements
Thanks and acknowledgements go to the industry funders of the #myUWEBBSview research project; Stride Treglown and ISG, and to the rest of our research team; Svetlana Cicmil, Hugo Gaggiotti, Mubarak Mohammed, Laura Collett, and Marianne Reed and the student ambassadors for the project, Shani Conner and Bartie Pitt-Brown. Thanks also to Bristol Business School, UWE, the Executive Team and of course all our participants and users of the building, for taking part, as well as the contributors to the ‘Identity’ track at the British Academy of Management, staff of Swansea Business School where earlier versions of this chapter were presented for feedback.
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Shortt, H., Warren, S. (2020). Photography: Using Instagram in Participant-Led Field Studies. In: Ward, J., Shortt, H. (eds) Using Arts-based Research Methods. Palgrave Studies in Business, Arts and Humanities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33069-9_9
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