In doing your research, you may find that some concepts are best explained using pictures. You may be using pictures to explain a concept to respondents or asking respondents to use them to illustrate their point. Or, you may be taking digital photographs to provide evidence of an event you are investigating. With the ease of point-and-shoot digital cameras and a whole digital library of images available for public use, researchers are enriching their research data through the inclusion of pictures.
NVivo enables you to import images in various formats (.bmp, .gif, .jpg, .jpeg, .tif, .tiff) to create picture sources. Once imported, all images are converted into JPEG files and are also exported in this format.
When planning the pictures to include in your project, you may find it useful to think about the following:
If you are including images taken from the Internet, check the copyright. Most digital images have watermarks that indicate if the image is copyrighted. These images are usually available for sale.
If you are taking the photos yourself and publishing these as part of your research, permission may need to be obtained from your subjects, from the owners of a place, or from the organizers of the event you are researching. You may also need to get approval from your ethics board or its equivalent.
Checking these ahead of time will save you from wasting precious effort and will ensure that the pictures can be included in your research.
Like all other sources, you can store pictures in Internal folders within NVivo. A good way to organize pictures is by using sets to create a gallery. You can create a theme for each picture gallery. Refer to Making a Picture Gallery for details of how you can do this in NVivo.
When analyzing a picture, you may find that there are certain portions of the image that are of particular interest or value to your research. NVivo enables you to select regions of a picture and include notes or log entries.
Like all other source types, you will be able to code picture sources and query them during your analysis. Both the picture and the log entries can be annotated, and linked to other documents within the project. In the log entry, you can also add a website link.