Visualized Relationships (ViRe) - Participants' Overview
Creators: name: Lobinger, Katharina
name: Lucchesi, Federico
name: Tarnutzer, Seraina
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024
Subjects: visual communication
participants overview
close social relationships
visualized relationships
couples
friends
participants
Switzerland

description: Project: Visualized relationships - functions and problems. A repertoire-oriented investigation of visual and image-related communication among couples and friends in Switzerland. The project has been funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, grant n°179484 (see below for further information).

File content: Participants' overview

This file contains an overview of the 60 participants interviewed for the ViRe project, providing details on their age, gender, living situation, as well as the type and duration of their relationships. For more information, refer to the method description below.

General project description

With technological changes in the field of “networked photography” and the increasing diffusion of photo sharing via mobile and networked devices, current media environments and practices are changing. The public discourse on these changes is dominated by fears of potentially negative implications for close social relationships. Critical scenarios of consequences and effects are often developed without a differentiated view that acknowledges the contexts of use and situational meanings of visual and image-related communication in close social relationships. Moreover, previous visual communication research has focused primarily on analyzing certain individual communication technologies and platforms or certain image motifs and genres but not on the interrelations of said elements. This project focused on close social relationships in the sense of non-media-centered media and communication research. The project proposed a repertoire-oriented study that explicitly examined the interaction of visual communication and visual communication technologies against the background of the highly complex multimodal communication repertoires of close social relationships in Switzerland. The focus was on the role, functions, and meaning of visual communication in couple relationships and close friendships, as well as related problem areas, rules, norms, and negotiation processes. This comprehensive approach allowed a differentiated assessment of the potentials and (assumed) risks of an increasing mediatization and visualization of close social relationships. Precisely, by not focusing exclusively on risks but starting with everyday communication, the project could was able to carve out the problematic aspects, identify negotiated “adequate” visual practices and their important social functions for the maintenance phase of close social relationships, and point out possible solutions.

Method description

The methodological design of the project combined qualitative pair and individual interviews conducted in different languages (English, French, (Swiss) German, and Italian). The study was based on 21 couples’ and nine friends’ dyads in Switzerland, amounting to 90 problem-oriented, semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 60 participants (30 pair interviews and 60 individual interviews). Interviews were combined with creative visual methods such as participatory network drawings and visual elicitation (e.g., participants being encouraged to bring 3-5 meaningful or typical pictures of their relationship at the start of the pair interview, and to show visuals during the interviews). Also, verbal prompts were used in the individual interviews to explore sensitive topics such as norms and rules of visual communication. During the first wave of COVID-19 in Switzerland in Spring 2020, the methodology was extended to quantitative online surveys and follow-up video interviews to assess participants’ well-being and changes in their visual communication practices. Interviews were transcribed verbatim in the four languages. Based on ethical considerations, verbal transcripts were carefully anonymized, and any identifiers in the collected visual data material were removed through pixelation. Verbal data was analyzed by conducting thematic analysis combining inductive and deductive categorization using NVivo. Visuals were analyzed through qualitative visual analysis, that is, a) image type analysis, which was developed within the scope of the project, based on a texto-material understanding of visuals, and b) through in-depth visual analysis. In addition, picture overviews and case summaries were created for each dyad to facilitate cross-case comparison. Notably, verbal and visual data were combined in these analytical steps, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of each unit of analysis.