When words fail us: using visual composites in research reporting

Abstract

This article describes a use of visual imagery in research reporting that helps to emphasize the human and social dimensions of research issues and encourage different ways of thinking about the findings and implications. During the literature review, in order to establish the authors’ longitudinal research into adult literacy, they observed that research participants’ own perspectives and rich life-worlds were usually invisible in final reports and articles, submerged under layers of governmental or scholarly discourse. An irony was that, while literacy theory was moving towards acknowledging multi-literacies, reporting of literacy research remained heavily mono-modal. The authors of this research wanted to differ from this trend by giving people who were affected by adult literacy policy a vivid presence within their reports. They were intrigued by the use of visual means to foreground interviewees’ own words both as a way to register their importance to readers and to try to signal the multi-modal nature of literacy. They depicted their interviewees’ words as language spoken by imagined individuals typical of the interviewees, grounded within photographs of their research site. In this article, the authors describe their intentions and methods in making their reports visual and artistic composites rather than more traditional densely worded policy reports; they deconstruct some of the key images contained in their report in order to critique their efficacy in achieving their aims.