The Opportunities and Challenges of Using Photo-Elicitation in Child-Centered Constructivist Grounded Theory Research

In the last three decades, there has been a growing interest in listening to children’s voices in child health research. Ensuring an appropriate level of dialogical engagement with children calls for participatory methods. Auto-driven photo-elicitation interviews (PEIs) are a powerful approach to obtain rich data from children. This article discusses the opportunities and challenges of using auto-driven PEIs in a health-related child-centered constructivist grounded theory study conducted in a poor-resourced country. Our experience shows that while the approach is effective for facilitating co-construction of data with children and for addressing the ethical and methodological issues associated with child-centered research in the context of a developing country, it is narrow on its own. Broadening the term to “picture-elicitation interviews” to allow for the inclusion of other forms of images would make the method more adaptable and inclusive. This would give children the flexibility of choosing pictorial options that best suit them and also help child participants and researchers address the practical and cultural challenges associated with the use of auto-driven PEI in a poor-resourced country.