Reflection/Commentary on a Past Article: “Photovoice as a Method for Revealing Community Perceptions of the Built and Social Environment”

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Nykiforuk, C. I. J.
  • Vallianatos, H.

• We are honored and delighted to be part of the International Journal of Qualitative Methods’ special issue featuring updates on the top 20 papers from the past 20 years. Here, we offer current reflections on our 2011 paper, Photovoice as a Method for Revealing Community Perceptions of the Built and Social Environment (Nykiforuk, Vallianatos, & Nieuwendyk, 2011). This article reported on one of the methodologies used in our mixed-methods design for a community-based participatory research (CBPR) project that examined ecological and individual facilitators and barriers to physical activity and healthy eating as experienced by four communities in Alberta, Canada (see Nykiforuk et al., 2012). We published our photovoice paper at a time when the public health research community’s interest in “built environment and health” was at an unprecedented high. Yet, at that time, the available methodological literature informing this critical area of inquiry was predominantly quantitative and often concerned with objective measurement of built environment features such as walkability, access to public transit, or proximity to green space. Our full study was among the first to integrate these “objective” quantitative measures of community with nuanced “subjective” knowledge of communities offered by residents, with the intention of using the integrated findings from those pieces to inform the collaborative, community-led development of local interventions to promote the health of residents. Thus, the so-called subjective knowledge of community residents was of paramount importance to the success of the full study, and the “subjective” substudy among the first in the built environment area to employ photovoice as the means for engaging residents to share their knowledge and perceptions of their communities.

• Date created

  2018-01-01

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Photography
  • Health
  • Experiences
  • Challenges

• Type of Item

  Article (Published)

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-vb50-cx63

• License

  Attribution 4.0 International