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The use of graphic representations of experience and the social environment in the data collection process is an emerging approach. The terms diagramming, mapping and drawing are often used interchangeably, with no common interdisciplinary understanding of what they mean. The lack of a unifying terminology has resulted in simultaneous but separate developments undermining a more coherent approach to this emergent method. By defining what a diagram is and examining where diagramming fits amongst other data collection approaches, this paper proposes the term diagrammatic elicitation to refer to the use of diagrams in the data collection process. Two subcategories of this approach include: (a) participant-led diagrammatic elicitation, where participants create original diagrams and (b) researcher-led diagrammatic elicitation, where the researcher draws the diagram during the data collection process for discussion or participants edit a researcher-prepared diagram. Establishing these terms will allow researchers to share best practice and developments across disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the under-theorization of visual techniques for social science research applications through the cultural–historical activity theory (CHAT). The ‘problem’ of ‘the visual’ in research is given an ontological framing by highlighting the ways in which the use of visual techniques as research tools – designed to elicit participant responses – has a bearing upon the types of data that are produced: the ‘how’ to some degree shapes the ‘what’ of research output. CHAT, by drawing our attention to the ways in which the artefacts we use to mediate researcher–participant relationship (our visual research tools) also affects them, alerts us to the meanings that we (inadvertently, reflexively or even deliberately) create in the research process. Three different kinds of visual techniques are explored according to a CHAT-informed typology: diagrams as a means of eliciting technical information, drawings as a means of eliciting interpretations and judgements and fictional characters as a means of eliciting personal identification. In each case, the ontological consequences of the choice of visual technique for the insight produced are discussed to explore the value of CHAT as one approach to deepening our understanding and appreciation of the value of ‘the visual’ in research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]