The current article intends to show photo-elicitation technique (PE) as a useful method of data collection about eating behavior and its potential to add gathered information to other methods usually used to study populations’ dietary intake. According to our findings, through the pictures and the narratives, PE gave information to better understand the participants’ eating behaviors, from the individual to the contextual level. This article also provides information about the opinions that participants have about the use of the technique that can be helpful at the moment of the decision if selecting this method in a research.
The PE was able to gather rich information about participants’ eating behaviors. Participants were able to show and …show more content…
They knew how their families eat, their tastes and preferences. This knowledge about family members’ eating behaviors could be explained because all participants, despite some of them worked out of home, were in charge of the family meals. This reaffirms the relevant role of women on eating habits at home. To our knowledge, no other study has indicated this kind of knowledge from women participants; however, in the Johnson, Sharkey, Dean, McIntosh, and Kubena’s study (2011), women took pictures about their children’s food. But, no information about their partner or husband appears on their pictures or discourses. In our study, husbands or partner, as well as, their children were mentioned several times during the conversations, and they appear in several pictures that participants …show more content…
From the pictures and the narratives obtained from them, rich information about eating behavior was obtained. This could be due to the better relationship or rapport between participants and researcher, the use of photo as a prompt to promote meaningful thoughts about eating habits in their context, the more empowering aspect of the methodology which have been described in previous studies using PE (Keller et al. (2007); Najib et al. (2013)). Also, it has been described that the use of PE provides further input of context related issues that influence eating behavior, such as situations, phenomena and relationships that could not be described or noticed by participants (Clark-Ibanez, 2004). Pictures are used as a way to dialogue and increase the awareness about the way they are basing the decision making regarding their food
The PE was able to gather rich information about participants’ eating behaviors. Participants were able to show and …show more content…
They knew how their families eat, their tastes and preferences. This knowledge about family members’ eating behaviors could be explained because all participants, despite some of them worked out of home, were in charge of the family meals. This reaffirms the relevant role of women on eating habits at home. To our knowledge, no other study has indicated this kind of knowledge from women participants; however, in the Johnson, Sharkey, Dean, McIntosh, and Kubena’s study (2011), women took pictures about their children’s food. But, no information about their partner or husband appears on their pictures or discourses. In our study, husbands or partner, as well as, their children were mentioned several times during the conversations, and they appear in several pictures that participants …show more content…
From the pictures and the narratives obtained from them, rich information about eating behavior was obtained. This could be due to the better relationship or rapport between participants and researcher, the use of photo as a prompt to promote meaningful thoughts about eating habits in their context, the more empowering aspect of the methodology which have been described in previous studies using PE (Keller et al. (2007); Najib et al. (2013)). Also, it has been described that the use of PE provides further input of context related issues that influence eating behavior, such as situations, phenomena and relationships that could not be described or noticed by participants (Clark-Ibanez, 2004). Pictures are used as a way to dialogue and increase the awareness about the way they are basing the decision making regarding their food