Table 2 Ideal-typical descriptions of photovoice and controlled behavioural experiments (with illustrative references).
Photovoice | Controlled behavioural experiments | |
|---|---|---|
Academic origins | Feminist participatory action research, critical pedagogy (Wang and Burris, 1997) | Experimental and behavioural economics, psychology (Wundt, 1909; Smith, 1976) |
Aims | To provide a space for participants to reflect on their experiences around a particular topic, promote critical dialogue and knowledge generation, and reach policy-makers to bring about positive change (Wang and Burris, 1997) | To explore and test hypotheses about human behaviour in specific (‘controlled’) decision environments, generate causal knowledge (Falk and Heckman, 2009) |
Research design | Developed together by researchers and participants throughout project (Castleden et al., 2008) | Developed by researchers a priori (Friedman and Sunder, 1994) |
Fieldwork | Researchers are ‘facilitators,’ working with groups of interested participants (often from historically marginalised or under-represented communities) to take photographs representing their experiences of an issue or topic, develop captions, and decide audiences to share their work with (Berrang-Ford et al., 2012) | Researchers are ‘experimenters,’ engaging a representative and/or random sample of participants from a specific population to make decisions given specific decision environments (Henrich et al., 2001; Cárdenas et al., 2017) |
Analysis | Developed collaboratively by researchers and participants (Lardeau et al., 2011) | Conducted by the researcher after the fieldwork is complete (statistical analysis of experimental data) (Friedman and Sunder, 1994) |
Results/presentation | Public photography exhibit to communicate findings, especially to policy-makers; reports, academic papers and presentations (Sutton-Brown, 2014) | Academic papers and presentations; possible presentation and discussion with participants and reports for policy-makers (Meinzen-Dick et al., 2018) |
