Being visible: PhotoVoice as assessment for children in a school-based psychiatric setting

Recovery-oriented mental health services empower all clients, including youth and their families, to be actively involved in directing their own care. In order to develop person-driven interventions, clinicians must understand what matters from their perspective. Thus, recovery-oriented assessments need self-report measures that adequately capture the domains and content that matter to a range of particular persons.

This study examined if and how PhotoVoice, a participatory research method used to empower and highlight the unique experiences of vulnerable groups, could be used as a recovery-oriented self-report measure for children with a mental health disorder.

We used PhotoVoice to engage four children with mental health related disorders at a day hospital program for severe behavioural disorders. The children, as co-researchers in this participatory approach, created life books from photographs and images of what mattered to them across nine sessions. To examine the PhotoVoice process, we used ethnographic methods, including child interviews and participant observations in their classes and at recess before, during and after the weekly sessions. Our overarching narrative-phenomenological theoretical framework focused data collection and analysis on what mattered most to the children.

The PhotoVoice method engaged and empowered the children in articulating what mattered in their everyday lives from their perspective that resulted in a novel, child-generated domain of 'mattering to others' for future self-report measures, and facilitated changes that generalized outside of the group. We illustrate these results by drawing a particularly illustrative case example from the study.

The PhotoVoice method foregrounded children's perspectives on what matters more explicitly than clinical or parent perspective on function.

The participatory philosophy and methods of PhotoVoice provides a viable approach to recovery-oriented self-report measures as well as an occupation-based assessment and intervention.