Hearing children's voices: Using Photovoice to plan service delivery

Abstract

Children's health and wellbeing in Australia is adversely affected by increasing socioeconomic disadvantage, social exclusion, and vulnerability, with numerous studies confirming the need for an improved societal response to the needs of children and their families. This requires researchers, planners and service delivery personnel to not only consider demographic variables and neighbourhood characteristics during service planning, but also interpretive research findings, practical experience and local knowledge. Photovoice is a research method ideally suited to this, as it is a medium for eliciting people's attitudes, beliefs, views, hopes, dreams, and ideas for their community. It is particularly useful in hearing children's voices as it is a non-intrusive, creative method of data collection, which caters to children's varying learning needs. Photovoice was employed with eighty primary-school aged children in a regional Australian community, in addition to interviews and focus groups with service providers and parents. Findings elicited participants' vision for their communities, strengths and areas of need. This paper comments on some of the key findings, the strengths and limitations of this form of data collection with children, and it concludes with recommendations for future research and practice.