Bringing it back to show and tell: combining visual and textual data to explore a psychological construct

In this paper, we use two studies to reflect on how we explored the topic of athlete well-being and the challenges presented when attempting to identify the shared meanings and theoretical underpinnings of this context-specific psychological concept. We discuss how semi-structured interviews left us feeling stifled during data analysis. This spurred us to explore visual methods, specifically photo-elicitation, in our second study to help us address a language gap and further understand the shared meanings and theoretical underpinnings of a psychological concept. Interviews in conjunction with photographs helped us collect more nuanced data, enabling a more interpretive analysis of athlete well-being. Visuals can be a means to bridge a language gap when it can be difficult to articulate one’s experience. Lastly, we present participants’ reflections on their experiences of selecting photographs and how they perceived this to aid in their understanding and articulation of athlete well-being. We argue that collecting data about a psychological construct is more ambiguous and abstruse for participants compared to asking them about a personal event, experience, or moment. We suggest that time to reflect on the psychological construct, through the selection process of photo-elicitation, is vital in collecting data with more depth and detail which leads to the ability to complete a more interpretive analysis. Finally, we bring this back to discuss the full potential of qualitative methods; operating from aligned epistemological and ontological underpinnings to subjectively explore a psychological construct where participants can ascribe their own cultural and contextual meanings.