Using Drawings in Qualitative Interviews: An Introduction to the Practice

Drawings are employed by qualitative researchers in many creative ways, and in many different contexts,and a variety of different terms are used to describe similar techniques. I present here a concisedescription of two basic approaches to integrating participants’ produced drawings into verbal qualitativeresearch interviews, along with characteristic cases of empirical research demonstrating how theseapproaches have been applied. I also provide a list of best practices and I discuss ethical issues. It iscommon for qualitative researchers to mix techniques in order to creatively address real-world researchchallenges. The proposed categorization, augmented by the list of best practices, can help researchers toeffectively integrate drawings and verbal interviews into a multimodal research project.