Visual Methods in Social Research

by Marcus Banks

There has been an explosion of interest in visual culture - coming largely from work in sociology, anthropology and cultural studies and while there are a number of practical and technical manuals available for film, photographic and other visual media, there is a dearth of writing that combines both the practical and the technical. This book redresses this with a balanced approach that is written primarily for students in the social sciences who wish to use visual materials in the course of empirical, qualitative field research. It should also be of interest to experienced researchers who wish to expand their methodological approaches.

Genres: Anthropology, Sociology

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Alexander Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although there is a lot of useful information in this book, and it's somewhat well organized, it is not the book it promises to be. This book opens claiming it is a book considering lots of methodological breadth even if primarily focusing on pictures, and is an introduction to "visual methods in social research" broadly. It is not that. Largely this is a rigorous perspective of ethnography of imagery in a largely offline world. Granted, this book was published very early for online methodology, and it doesn't deal very much with digitally native imagery. That said, the Internet did exist, and I expected a little more about it. Instead it primarily focuses on cultural differences between India and Jains with respect to European/US expectations of images.

Secondly, there were many supposedly core topics as described by the author (e.g. the necessary difference in form and content of images) but yet the author does not define these concepts or attempt to describe what they are thoroughly in practice.

So, long story short: reader be warned this is primarily for the classically ethnographic methodological approach and, is not in fact, a general introduction, and it is not quite so introductory as it intends to be.

[Krystl Louwagie · Rating 2 out of 5]

2007 review:

The title explains this book. But it was, for the most part, boring and didn't introduce a lot of new or original ideas for me.