Elicitation Techniques - Getting People To Talk About Ideas They Don't Usually Talk About

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Elicitation Techniques: Getting

People to Talk About Ideas
They Don’t Usually Talk About
a
Keith C. Barton
a
Indiana University
Published online: 26 May 2015.
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To cite this article: Keith C. Barton (2015) Elicitation Techniques: Getting People
to Talk About Ideas They Don’t Usually Talk About, Theory & Research in Social
Education, 43:2, 179-205
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Theory & Research in Social Education, 43: 179–205, 2015
Copyright © College and University Faculty Assembly of
National Council for the Social Studies
ISSN 0093-3104 print / 2163-1654 online
DOI: 10.1080/00933104.2015.1034392
Elicitation Techniques: Getting People to Talk

About Ideas They Don’t Usually Talk About
Keith C. Barton
Indiana University
Abstract: Elicitation techniques are a category of research tasks that use visual, verbal,
or written stimuli to encourage participants to talk about their ideas. These tasks are par-
ticularly useful for exploring topics that may be difficult to discuss in formal interviews,
such as those that involve sensitive issues or rely on tacit knowledge. Elicitation tech-
niques can also reduce power imbalances between interviewers and respondents, and
they can enhance participants’ ability to elaborate on their own conceptions of the world,
rather than limiting them to categories derived from theory or previous research. Among
the most useful of such techniques are those that involve respondents in arranging stim-
ulus materials, constructing materials in response to stimuli, and explaining stimulus
materials. Each of these has been used to explore important topics in social education,
and familiarity with a range of elicitation techniques enables researchers to overcome
many barriers to productive interviewing.
Keywords: elicitation techniques, interview research, research methods
Social studies researchers often ask about topics that are difficult to dis-
cuss in formal interviews. These include controversial political topics; abstract
concepts, such as democracy or human rights; issues that touch on ethnic, reli-
gious, gender, or sexual identities; ideas that may be largely tacit, such as
those related to teaching and schooling; and conceptual understandings that
are rarely discussed in everyday conversation (e.g., historical time, signifi-
cance, or evidence). Asking straightforward questions about these subjects can
be frustrating, because many participants either cannot talk about them easily
or prefer not to, even with a trusted researcher—much less with someone they
barely know. However, a class of research tasks known as elicitation techniques
Correspondence should be sent to Keith C. Barton, Department of Curriculum and

Instruction, Indiana University, 3234 Wright Education Building, Bloomington, IN
47405. Email: kcbarton@indiana.edu
180 Barton
can facilitate such conversations by displacing the focus of interviews onto

external stimuli and, in some cases, changing the power balance between
researchers and participants. Familiarity with a range of such techniques can
help researchers collect rich data even on difficult topics.
Many researchers, however, are not aware of the wide variety of elicitation
techniques available to them. In part, this may be due to the diverse origins
of these tasks, many of which originated in sociology, anthropology, or psy-
chology. Commonly used texts in educational research, meanwhile, give scant
attention to elicitation techniques (e.g., Creswell, 2008; Fraenkel & Wallen,
2006; Patton, 2002), and even standard works on interview research devote lit-
tle or no space to the topic (e.g., Brinkmann & Kvale, 2015; Seidman, 2013).
As a result, even though elicitation techniques are common in educational
research, researchers may only be familiar with the use of particular tasks
in specialized areas of study, such as concept maps in science education or
stimulated recall in studies of teachers’ decision making. If researchers have
only encountered one such method, they may not realize that they can choose
from a range of options, each suited to a different purpose. The range of tasks
may also be obscured by a lack of consistent terminology or shared theoret-
ical assumptions: Sometimes these tasks (or a subset of them) are referred
to as semi-projective devices (Binford, 1984), visual methods (Harper, 1994),
or structured interviewing methods (Bernard, 2006), or as part of approaches
such as phenomenography (Marton, 1986), Piagetian clinical interviewing
(Ginsburg, 1997), or personal construct psychology (Ryle, 1975). This special-
ized and varied terminology, combined with a lack of elaboration in research
methods texts, makes it difficult to see the wider landscape of elicitation. This
article aims not to provide a definitive account of elicitation techniques but to
chart some of the contours of the field so that researchers can better see the
variety of paths available to them.
OVERCOMING BARRIERS TO DISCUSSION
Although elicitation techniques have no single or authoritative definition,

the concept most often refers to research tasks that use visual, verbal, or written
stimuli to encourage people to share their ideas (e.g., Johnson & Weller, 2002).
Such methods provide useful alternatives to direct questions about participants’
thinking, particularly when social, cultural, or psychological barriers make it
difficult to talk about a topic. Although both children and adults can easily
articulate their ideas about some topics, they have much less experience talking
about others. Ask primary teachers how they teach the number line, and they
will probably be able to answer in detail. Ask 8-year-olds how their classmates
behave on the bus and they will provide rich data. But ask the same teachers
how they provide emotional support to students, or the 8-year-olds how social
life has changed over the last two centuries, and responses will be much less
Elicitation Techniques 181
complex. Researchers make their living with words, and it is hardly surprising
they consider open-ended, verbal interviews a comfortable methodology. But
not all participants have either the background or the inclination to engage in
extended, abstract verbal exchanges.
A number of factors affect participants’ willingness and ability to discuss
their ideas during formal interviews. As Tobin, Hsueh, and Karasawa (2009)
point out, teachers can find it difficult to answer a question such as, “What is
your philosophy of classroom management?” both because it is too abstract
and because it sounds too much like an exam question. As a result, asking
broad, open-ended questions or soliciting the kind of “grand tour” responses
recommended in ethnographic interviews (Spradley, 1979) is often ineffec-

tive. In fact, such nondirective interviews actually can create anxiety among
respondents, because they may not know what is “really” being asked or what
expectations the researcher brings to the setting (Whyte, 1984). Children (and
others who consider themselves less knowledgeable than researchers) may feel
that they are being tested on their ability to supply the right answers. The length
and complexity of participants’ responses are also affected by their memory,
their perception of the relevance of questions, and their own feelings of self-
worth or social desirability (Johnson & Weller, 2002). Controversial topics in
particular may lead respondents to provide answers that they feel will make a
positive impression on the researcher, while topics they perceive as taboo may
lead them to offer little more than vague generalities.
Lack of elaboration, however, does not necessarily indicate lack of knowl-
edge, nor does it signal mild opinions or lack of interest. Participants may know
a great deal about a topic and have a great deal to say, but special tasks are
sometimes necessary to bring their ideas to the surface, as well as to encourage
them to articulate those ideas in deeper and more complex ways. Elicitation
techniques accomplish this by making the research process more transparent,
comfortable, and authentic. Unlike written instruments, classroom observa-
tions, or less structured interviews, elicitation techniques allow participants to
more easily see what researchers hope to accomplish. Walker and Widel (1985)
tell of a teacher who was engaged both in their own project with visual stimuli
and another more traditional research study. The teacher noted that despite the
other researcher’s explanations, she never really understood the study or felt
a part of it. “Somehow,” she said, “it all seems to disappear into his notebook
and never come back.” But she noted that in the elicitation study, “I can see
what you are doing. I can get interested it, and so can the kids” (p. 213).
In addition to their transparency, elicitation tasks can make the inter-
view setting more comfortable (Bernard, 2006; Catterall & Ibbotson, 2000;
Whyte, 1984). Putting items in order, commenting on photographs, or sketch-
ing a diagram are activities that provoke little anxiety. Even young children
are usually not afraid they will fail to live up to researchers’ expectations.
Many such tasks mirror conversations people have in daily life, such as com-
menting on the images in a family photo album (Schwartz, 1989). Looking
182 Barton
at photographs can cover otherwise awkward silences, and there is no need

for direct eye contact. Participants even become less self-conscious about note-
taking or recording equipment because questions focus on materials rather than
the respondent. Even when researchers probe participants’ responses, the pres-
ence of physical materials—particularly visual images—can make this process
less threatening. Asking and answering a set of purely verbal questions, espe-
cially when researchers and participants come from different backgrounds,
seems a lot like schooling, and respondents sometimes resent repeated ques-
tions or probes. When this happens, their answers can become stilted and
lead to an uncomfortable and unproductive experience. But as Collier and
Collier (1986) argue, materials such as photographs can function as a third

party in interviews, as researchers and informants work together to explore and
understand their content. They suggested that “verbal questioning can create a
distance between interviewer and informants, whereas use of photographs can
pull people together” (p. 131).
Not only can such tasks make interviews more comfortable, they also can
equalize the interpretive process by giving participants greater voice (Walker
& Widel, 1985). Research relationships often are fraught with power imbal-
ances, such as those between scholars and practitioners, adults and children,
men and women, Whites and minorities, or members of different cultures or
economic backgrounds (Schratz & Steiner-Löffler, 1998; Tobin & Davidson,
1990). Participants can be keenly aware of these imbalances, and they may
actively resist researchers’ attempts to get to know them (Tobin, 2000). But
by sharing in the definition of meaning, individuals no longer serve as the
“subjects” of research but take on a more active role and exert greater agency
(Harper, 1988). In some cases—such as the analysis of photographs—they lit-
erally become experts who lead researchers through content (Collier & Collier,
1986) rather than receptacle of information, extracted by researchers, ana-
lyzed and assembled elsewhere (Banks, 2001). With many tasks, participants
can control the exchange of information, introduce ideas and concepts they
consider relevant and significant, and participate meaningfully in the research
process.
Giving participants greater control can also yield data that more authenti-
cally reflect their conceptual categories—for example, by revising, adding to,
or omitting stimulus materials (e.g., Barton & McCully, 2005; Cunningham,
2006). Allowing for such input not only shifts the power balance but also
makes data more valuable. Interpretations constructed by outsiders may have
little explanatory power in naturalistic contexts. We can often understand real-
world settings only by becoming familiar with how insiders make sense of
their world. This, after all, was Jean Piaget’s central project: to understand the
development of children’s thinking on its own terms—their “natural mental
inclination”—rather than by forcing it into adult frameworks of interpreta-
tion (Ginsburg, 1997, p. 48). Although researchers may believe that they can
assemble tasks that allow perspectives to emerge, asking participants them-

selves to contribute to the process makes this more likely. Allowing participants
to construct, name, and explain their own conceptual categories increases the
likelihood that responses will be grounded in their own experiences and that
they will supply ideas and associations that researchers might not notice on
their own (Gates, 1976; Harper, 1988; Schratz & Steiner-Löffler, 1998; Soley
& Smith, 2008; Wagner, 1979).
ARRANGEMENT TASKS
One of the most useful forms of elicitation involves asking participants

to categorize or sequence stimuli and explain their arrangements. By making
judgments about how items relate to each other, participants are led to con-
sider the abstract principles, patterns, or conceptual categories that guide their
decisions—precisely the kinds of tacit understandings that otherwise may be
difficult to articulate. This kind of task is especially useful when researchers
hope to avoid imposing their own concepts on participants—and thus over-
determining their responses—and instead want to give them the chance to
articulate categories that make sense to them. This is part of the long-standing
quest in anthropology and other social sciences to better understand how par-
ticipants themselves see the world (Bernard, 2006; Borgatti, 1999; Weller &
Romney, 1988).
Sorting
Sorting tasks—also referred to as card sorts, pile sorts, and judged simi-
larity tasks—are used to elicit participants’ conceptual categories. The purpose
of sorting is to identify how participants think about which items go together
in a category and why (Bernard, 2006; Borgatti, 1999; Roos, 1998; Weller &
Romney, 1988). A sorting task begins with a set of items (often on pieces of
heavy or laminated paper to encourage physical manipulation), such as words
or images that refer to physical objects, historical or contemporary events,
teaching practices, or any aspect of culture and society. Participants are asked
to sort these into groups that make sense to them, so that the items in each
pile belong together in some way. Usually participants are not given specific
criteria to use in sorting items, although they may be asked to sort them into a
given number of groups (because some people tend to be “lumpers” and others
“splitters”). After settling on their groups, participants may then be asked to
label each group and then, crucially, to explain how they made their decisions
about which items should go together. A variation of sorting involves system-
atically presenting two items at a time and asking participants to explain which
two are most similar and why.
184 Barton
Barton and McCully (2005, 2010), for example, used a sorting task to
investigate how students in Northern Ireland connected history to their senses
of identity. Previous research on young people’s identities in Northern Ireland
had relied on written surveys in which students were simply asked to select
from among terms, such as British, Irish, Northern Irish, or European. This
kind of survey item is not explicitly linked to history, but just as importantly, it
assumes that researchers can determine ahead of time the alternatives that stu-
dents will consider most salient. To allow greater space for students to discuss
their own concepts of history and identity, Barton and McCully provided par-
ticipants with 28 images covering a variety of historical topics, which included
British, Irish, Northern Irish, and world history; political, military, and social
history; iconic Nationalist and Unionist leaders; as well as individuals uncon-
nected to the two countries. They asked students to work in pairs to assemble
these into “groups that you think belong together” (2010, p. 179). After stu-
dents had completed the task, they were asked to explain what tied each group
of images together, to select which image or group had “the most to do with
you or who you are” (2010, p. 154), and to explain why. Many students cre-
ated and selected groups that related to either Nationalist or Unionist history,
yet the majority did not. Instead, they chose groups related to leaders, local
history, or the Troubles more generally. Students’ attachment to such historical
topics likely would not have been evident if researchers had determined the set
of categories ahead of time.
Cunningham (2003, 2006) used a card sort exercise as part of her investiga-
tion of British history teachers’ instructional goals and practices. Drawing from
long-standing controversies over the purpose of teaching history, Cunningham
created 16 cards, each with a different sentence that captured important aspects
of these perspectives. She placed each sentence on an index card and asked
teachers to sort the cards into groups. She then asked them to identify those
that came closest to their own goals for students. She found, however, that par-
ticipants’ groupings had little connection to the controversies that so inspire
historians, politicians, and teacher educators. Instead, they grouped them into
such categories as primary and secondary goals, goals versus activities, goals
and facilitating activities, and practices that are intrinsic to the subject versus
those that enrich students’ lives. This is precisely the value of a sorting task: It
can show that the concepts we develop as theorists may have little salience to
practitioners, who see the world in very different terms.
Although anthropologists often use data derived directly from sorting
tasks as ends in themselves, their usefulness is magnified when participants’
responses become a stimulus for conversation. Barton and McCully (2005,
2010), for example, used students’ groupings as an entry point for asking
them about perceptions of history in Northern Ireland. The images and group-
ings were concrete reference points in these discussions—ones that students
referred back to often—and the sorting task itself appeared to serve as a kind
of “warm up” to more abstract discussions. For Cunningham (2003, 2006),
the sorting task was just one component of a study that included multiple
interviews and long-term classroom observations. In some cases, teachers’
observed practices contradicted the goals they claimed to hold when sorting
cards, and discussing such discrepancies led to important insights into factors
that mediated teachers’ ability (or desire) to enact their purposes for instruction.
Ordering
Another useful strategy for exploring participants’ conceptual categories

is ordering. As with sorting tasks, participants are given a set of items, but
instead of placing them into categories, they are asked either to arrange them
along a continuum or to select some subset as being most central to a concept,
and then to justify their choices. Depending on the topic, participants might
be asked to order items based on importance, interest, difficulty, age, or any
other characteristic that varies along a scale. This is a familiar task, because
most people have practice talking about how things have more or less of a
certain quality and why they think so—the best recipes, the funniest movies, the
most dominant athletes, and so on. Even young children are often asked such
questions as “Which do you like best?” and asked to explain why. In informal
settings, justifying this kind of ordering (even though no one calls it that) is the
foundation of much conversation. Participants are familiar with this format and
can easily understand what is being asked of them.
To investigate elementary students’ understanding of historical time, for
example, Barton and Levstik (1996; see also Levstik & Barton, 1996) pre-
sented participants with two large photographs—one of a family moving west
in the late 1800s, the other of teenagers at a drive-in restaurant in the 1950s—
and asked them to sequence the images based on which was older and which
was newer, or “closer to now.” Once students had decided on the order, they
were asked to explain how they knew. Then they were presented with seven
other images, one at a time, and for each, they were asked whether it was
older or newer than the others, from about the same time, or between two
of the times, and to explain their reasoning. This research yielded important
information on students’ chronological understanding (even 6-year-olds put
most images in the correct order), the content of their historical knowledge
(most of their explanations related to details of social life, such as fashion or
technology), their reasoning processes (historical changes were tied to a narra-
tive of progress), and the structure of their understanding of time (sequencing
preceded knowledge of specific dates).
Ordering need not always involve placement along a continuum. In Ho’s
(2010) study of Singaporean students’ understandings of the country’s national
narrative, she presented students with a set of captioned images that reflected
a variety of people, events, or ideas from the country’s past and present and
asked them to select those that would best represent Singapore to someone
186 Barton
from another country. She then asked them to explain their choices and omis-
sions. She found that despite differences in students’ ethnic, academic, and
socioeconomic backgrounds, they consistently represented Singapore’s history
in terms of progress and consensus, and they particularly emphasized the need
for harmony in the face of potential racial and religious conflict. Ho found few
instances of countervailing perspectives or attempts to think outside the rigid
racial categories that characterize official policy in Singapore. The uniformity
of students’ responses suggests that despite Singapore schools’ espoused goal
of developing “critical thinkers,” the curriculum had not provided them with a
way of thinking about alternative historical narratives. Similar tasks have been
used to investigate students’ ideas about historical significance in a number of

countries (e.g., Barton, 2005; Barton & Levstik, 1998; Levstik, 2001; Peck,
2010; Yeager, Foster, & Greer, 2002) and among varied ethnic groups in the
United States (e.g., An, 2009; Epstein, 2009; Terzian & Yeager, 2007). Such
studies have provided important information on the socially situated nature of
students’ perceptions of the meaning and purpose of learning about the past.
Ordering tasks are especially useful for determining which features people
consider central to particular concepts or practices (such as historical signifi-
cance or the ordering of events in time). Stated another way, rankings are useful
in eliciting the underlying criteria people use to determine how well an item
fits certain conceptual categories. Although the tasks in these examples investi-
gated very different aspects of students’ understanding, each required students
to rank items and then justify their rankings. In each, the data demonstrated
criteria that students considered salient in making their decisions—details of
social and material life in the case of historical time, progress and consensus
in the case of national identity. Similar tasks could be used to investigate activ-
ities that respondents consider most central to citizenship, equality, cultural
harmony, economic development, or other concepts. On a practical note, how-
ever, researchers should not expect respondents to explain each of their choices
and their relative rankings when working with a large set of items. Providing
such detail is too tedious, and it suggests a higher degree of precision than
respondents are likely to have applied in their rankings.
CONSTRUCTION TASKS
Instead of asking participants to manipulate materials created by

researchers, a second group of techniques engages them in constructing their
own responses to stimuli—in words, images, or a combination of the two. This
provides an even greater space for uncovering how respondents make sense
of the world, because they are less limited by available materials. Concept
maps are a well-known example of asking participants to construct responses
using words and images (e.g., Edmondson, 2000), but other techniques include
drawing, projective devices, and freelisting and sentence completion.
Drawing
Asking participants to draw a picture or diagram has two important uses.

First, drawing can be used with populations whose oral and written language
may not be adequate to fully express their ideas, such as young children.
To explore Irish primary children’s understanding of identity, for example,
Waldron and Pike (2006) asked them to draw pictures of what it means to
be Irish—both from their own perspective and from that of an imagined per-
son from another country. They also asked children to write and talk about
this issue, but drawing provided an alternative means of expression and thus
potentially tapped into the thinking of students who were less verbal or who
were less comfortable with writing or being interviewed. Drawing is a highly
familiar task for most children, and even the youngest are unlikely to balk at a
request to “draw a picture of . . . .”
Drawing is especially useful in investigating ideas about geographic space,
and it is an established technique in research on children’s geographic think-
ing (Pike, 2011). Gillespie (2010), for example, asked Amish and non-Amish
children to draw maps of their neighborhoods. Amish children focused pri-
marily on their families’ farms and excluded those of their neighbors, while
non-Amish children (in the same area) tended to include neighbors, as well
as a variety of local landmarks beyond their own farm. Other written or ver-
bal methods would be unlikely to provide such insight into students’ socially
situated constructions of geographic space.
Although drawings may seem appropriate only for young children, this
method can stimulate deeper and more elaborate verbal responses even among
older students and adults. Whenever people create art, they make symbolic
choices, and interviewers can ask them to reflect on the meaning of those
choices. Hunter and Farthing (2008), for example, asked teenagers to create
representations of concepts such as nation, heritage, interpretation, memory,
and identity. One student, who focused on culture, drew a fruit bowl and wrote:
Culture is like a fruit bowl, full of lots of different flavours, shapes and
sizes, each unique in its own way . . . . It is all piled together in the world,
changing with age, depleting in its uniqueness, as it becomes mouldy,
more like each other. Many cultures are dying in their traditions and
heritage today, like fruit as it rots. (p. 17)
This was clearly an articulate and creative student, but the depth of her
answer may have been due in part to the need to justify the symbolic choices
she made in her drawing. Similarly, Bagnoli (2009) asked young people who
had migrated between England and Italy to draw who they were at that moment
and to include people and things important to them. The visual elements of their
drawings often served as metaphors that allowed them to holistically express
188 Barton
their associations and meanings and to narrate complex stories about their
lives—as in the work of one youth who used his drawing of a crossroads to
explain the choices he faced in life.
Like many elicitation techniques, drawings are valuable in large part
because they lead to better conversations. Having children draw a picture, for
example, can serve as an icebreaker that makes them feel more comfortable
in interviews (Morrow, 1998). Older participants may also be put at ease by
beginning with a drawing, although some may be put off by the prospect of
a researcher watching them as they draw. This is less problematic in group
settings, where after some initial reticence, participants usually shed their inhi-
bitions as they recognize they are not alone in lacking artistic skills. They
quickly realize that it is not the drawing that is important but what it allows
them to express. This expression of meaning is precisely what researchers
want, and by asking participants to explain and reflect on their drawings, they
gain insight into their conceptual understandings, which may include their
“plans, dreams, dilemmas, and emotions” (Bagnoli, 2009, p. 551).
Projective Devices
Projective devices include a large class of tasks and procedures that ask
participants to respond to ambiguous or open-ended stimuli, sometimes by
imagining themselves in a particular setting. In popular culture, the most well-
known such instruments are the Rorschach test (in which participants describe
what they see in a standardized set of inkblots) and the Thematic Apperception
Test (in which participants tell dramatic stories about ambiguous images of
people in daily settings). Psychologists have most often used such techniques to
assess personality characteristics (or in some cases to identify a history of expe-
riences such as child sexual abuse), but the validity and reliability of projective
devices for clinical purposes has not been well supported in the literature
(Lilienfeld, Wood, & Garb, 2000). Educational researchers, however, rarely
use the standardized instruments and scoring indexes favored by psychologists,
and they typically are not interested in personality types, unconscious psycho-
logical dynamics, or hidden meanings. Instead, they usually create their own
content- and context-specific tasks to elicit, in a relatively straightforward way,
attitudes about teaching, learning, or the wider society.
Recent theorizing about changes in youth political involvement, for exam-
ple, suggests that young people prefer activities that involve social welfare
needs rather than community building and that they are more likely to pre-
fer volunteerism and direct political action over traditional forms of political
involvement. Middaugh (2009) investigated the extent to which these variables
influenced students’ willingness to engage in civic and political activities, as
well as whether their attitudes varied by gender or ethnicity. Her research
design was a traditionally quantitative one, but her instrumentation could not
involve simple attitude scales, because it was unlikely that her participants
would be working with well-developed conceptual distinctions among these
features of civic and political involvement—and even if they were, it was
unlikely that the narrow and precise wording of a survey could capture those
distinctions. Instead, she used a series of scenarios in which conditions of civic
involvement were systematically varied on the basis of whether they involved
direct action, volunteerism, or traditional political activity (such as collecting
signatures for a ballot initiative). For each, she asked whether the character in
the scenario should help with the planned action, whether it would be accept-
able for the character not to participate, and whether the participant him/herself
would take part. Somewhat surprisingly, she found that young people in her
study did not prefer social welfare issues over community building, that they
considered volunteerism and traditional politics equally desirable, and that they
preferred both of these to direct action. The concreteness of these scenarios
likely produced more specific responses than abstract questions about “social
welfare” or “community involvement” could have, and asking students to eval-
uate the proper behavior for both themselves and others provided information
on the extent to which they considered civic involvement obligatory.
A similar method can be used to investigate how students make sense of
the perspectives of people in history. This is a key aspect of historical think-
ing: To understand the actions of people in the past, students have to understand
their values, attitudes, and beliefs, as well as recognize how societal institutions
at the time structured people’s opportunities and limitations. Students must also
attempt to distinguish historical patterns of thought from those that character-
ize contemporary society. Historical perspective-taking has been the object of
a great deal of scholarship in the field (for a review, see Barton & Levstik,
2004), but empirical research has been limited by a reliance on reactions to
verbal questions and written sources. Although it is possible to tease out stu-
dents’ understanding of perspective from their answers to questions about the
actions and motivations of people in the past, this kind of analysis involves a
high level of inference, precisely because this is a topic that students often have
little experience discussing. Gambill (2014), on the other hand, presented stu-
dents who were participating in a simulation of the Underground Railroad with
images such as that in Figure 1, and she asked them to imagine what the char-
acter was thinking. Students are familiar with the idea of thought balloons, and
this task allowed them to talk about empathy in a way that was both concrete
and familiar. She found that students’ understanding of the factors involved in
deciding to escape were more varied after the simulation than before and that
high school students’ ideas were more complex than those of middle school
students. Asking follow-up questions such as “Is that what she would think or
what you would be thinking?” or “What about if you went back in time, what
would you be thinking?,” would provide further data on the distinctions stu-
dents made between historical perspectives and their own, and such questions
would be easily comprehensible within the context of responding to the image.
190 Barton
Figure 1. Image for Eliciting Students’ Understanding of the Perspective of an

Escaping Slave (Still, 1872, p. 312; public domain)
Projective techniques can be particularly useful when researchers are

interested in topics that are socially sensitive. Such techniques can allow par-
ticipants to displace their thoughts or feelings onto others and to thus make
their own disclosures seem potentially less threatening (Soley & Smith, 2008).
These tasks have been shown to produce answers that are not only more elabo-
rate but materially different than first-person questions (Soley & Smith, 2008),
and they may capture attitudes or beliefs that participants otherwise would
be reluctant to reveal (Catterall & Ibbotson, 2000). Two important but under-
researched topics, for example, are ideas about religion and about economic
inequality. Bringing up such topics can be controversial, and asking children
about them could provoke anxiety, but projective techniques can alleviate some
of this potential awkwardness. In a study of the development of students’ ideas
about religion, for example, Goldman (1964) showed (Christian) students a
drawing of a young child entering church and asked how often they thought the
family went there, what they thought the child enjoyed and did not enjoy about
church, why the mother and father attended, and whether going there helped
the child in any way. He then showed a drawing of either a girl or boy praying
beside his/her bed and asked children how often they thought the child prayed,
what they thought the prayer was about, to whom it was addressed, whether
prayer requests ever came true, and why. Displacing the questions onto children
other than the respondents themselves may have made this a more comfortable
task than direct questions about their own religious ideas and experiences.
Similarly, to investigate young people’s views about socioeconomic status,
Weinger (2000) showed participants from lower- and middle-class economic
backgrounds photographs of two homes—one of them rundown and unkempt,
the other in good condition and with a well-manicured lawn—and asked them
to describe the people who lived there. She found that although both groups
characterized the imagined people in the rundown home in positive or neutral
terms, middle-class children’s responses were vague, while poorer students
specifically identified characteristics such as family closeness, coping skills,

and helpfulness, alongside financial hardships and social rejection. Both groups
also described the middle-class family in positive terms, but middle-class chil-
dren were more likely to point to their normality and responsibility, while
poorer children also noted their financial good fortune, rule-following, cleanli-
ness and good manners, and quality of parenting. Some, though, suggested they
were callous and indifferent to the plight of the poor. This task likely was effec-
tive in eliciting participants’ responses not only because of its visual nature but
also because it asked students to imagine personal characteristics of imaginary
families. Students may have been more reticent to talk about their own families
or those of people they knew.
Freelisting and Sentence Completion
One of the simplest forms of elicitation is freelisting, in which partici-

pants name (either orally or in writing) all the examples of something they
can remember. Anthropologists, for example, have asked participants to list
examples of animals, fish, fruit, illnesses, and even “bad words.” Because some
cultural groups divide the world differently than others, this task provides infor-
mation on what a community considers fruit, illness, bad words, and so on.
Asking participants to list items provides information not only on boundaries
of a cultural domain (what is a bad word and what is not) but on how important
particular examples are within that domain. Researchers who use this technique
assume that the more widely shared an example is (i.e., the more often it crops
up on participants’ lists), the more central it is to that group’s way of thinking
about the domain. In addition, the earlier an item occurs within lists, the more
salient it is within the community (Bernard, 2006; Borgatti, 1999; Weller &
Romney, 1988).
Seixas (1994), for example, gave 10th-graders a survey in which he asked
them to do the following: “Think briefly about all of the events and develop-
ments which have happened in the past approximately 500 years. List three
which, in your opinion, are the most important” (p. 301). Using this freelisting
task, he was able to identify not only the specific events students considered
192 Barton
important (their top three choices were the World Wars, the rise and fall of
Communism, and European exploration of the Americas) but also the kinds
of events they thought were significant: Nearly all responses related to inter-
national politics and war, whereas very few dealt with gender, reproduction,
work, childhood, diet, art, or thought. For these students, history (or at least,
significant history) consisted of war and politics, not of social and material life.
Seixas also interviewed a subset of participants to explore their reasons for
identifying items on their lists, and in these discussions, it became clear that
students used two principal criteria for judging historical significance: Some
items were part of narratives that explained the impact of events on the modern
world, while others served as analogies from which people in the present might
learn lessons.
Because of the simplicity of freelisting, it can be used with large sam-
ples and can produce extensive numerical data. Wineburg and Monte-Sano
(2008), for example, asked 2,000 high school students and 2,000 adults to
name the most famous Americans in history, from the time of Columbus to
the present. (They asked participants not to include presidents or their wives.)
Interestingly, each of the top three responses among students were African
Americans (Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and Harriet Tubman), and each
of these were among the 10 most frequently named figures among adults. This
suggests that the inclusion of African American history in both schools and
popular culture has achieved a remarkable degree of consensus in the contem-
porary United States. At the same time, other struggles for equality or reform
went largely unnoticed by both groups: Susan B. Anthony was the only suf-
frage leader to be mentioned on more than 5% of the lists, and other reformers,
labor activities, or minority leaders were named by only a handful of students.
These findings led the authors to suggest that “America’s multihued movement
for equality . . . has been seemingly reduced to an equation of black and white”
(p. 646).
Another study of the same topic illustrates some of the trade-offs involved
in designing such tasks. Epstein (2009) asked 46 high school students to
both identify and explain three important events and actors in U.S. history.
Analyzing the amount of data produced by such explanations required a
much smaller sample size and thus allowed for many fewer comparisons, but
the result was a more nuanced understanding of differences among groups.
Wineburg and Monte-Sano (2008) found differences in the frequency with
which Whites and Blacks identified members of each ethnic group, but Epstein
was able to describe the nature of their thinking: Whites were more likely to
see civil rights as bestowed by Whites upon Blacks, whereas Blacks thought
of the struggle as having been waged by members of that community and as
having been longer in coming.
Sentence completion shares many similarities with freelisting. Rather than
asking for a list of items, however, researchers provide a stem and ask partici-
pants to complete the sentence with single words and phrases (“I like to learn
about . . . ”) or more open-ended and potentially elaborate responses (“School

is . . . ”). Longer stems typically are more structured and narrow the range of
possible responses, while shorter stems provide more freedom for participants
to interpret sentences in a variety of ways (Soley & Smith, 2008). Although
this technique is sometimes classified as a projective device and used to mea-
sure personality characteristics or emotional disturbances (Forer, 1960; Rotter,
1951), it has also been used to explore participants’ social attitudes and their
ideas about specific educational topics. In evaluating the implementation of a
new curriculum in New Zealand, for example, Sinnema (2010) asked teach-
ers to complete the sentence, “Values in the New Zealand Curriculum requires
teachers to . . . .” The intent of the curriculum was for teachers to provide

students with opportunities to explore the nature of values and their role in
social life, but Sinnema found that many respondents focused only on instilling
particular values, especially as a means of behavior management.
Sentence completion tasks can also be used when researchers want to nar-
row and focus participants’ responses. In research on students’ ideas about
historical agency, for example, Barton (2010) found that when advanced his-
tory students were asked (without an elicitation task) to explain the rise of
Nazism, many of them provided detailed and sophisticated explanations of a
variety of historical contingencies. They pointed to such factors as ideology,
popular feeling, political alliances, economic fluctuations, the intransigence of
political leaders, and the weakness of international agreements. Their explana-
tions were so sophisticated they left almost no stone unturned. But when asked
instead to complete the sentence, “The rise of Nazism would never have hap-
pened if . . . ,” their responses became much more pointed and specific, and this
provided insight into what students considered necessary and sufficient causes
rather than supporting and catalyzing conditions. A number of students also
implied that nothing could have prevented Nazism, and this suggests a view
of historical inevitability that ignores the ability of groups and individuals to
influence the course of history—a finding that has important implications for
how students interpret the role of agency in social life.
Freelisting and sentence completion share a number of important practical
advantages: they can be adapted to practically any topic; are easy to adminis-
ter; can be used in both oral and written versions; can be used with groups or
individuals; can be adapted to a variety of cultural contexts; and produce data
that can be analyzed qualitatively, quantitatively, or both (Lindzey, 1961; Soley
& Smith, 2008). Regardless of format, though, these techniques are best used
when the topic of interest has an accepted name or can be clearly described
(Borgatti, 1999), such as “famous Americans,” “important historical events,”
and “what a citizen does.” However, freelisting can be alienating when respon-
dents feel that researchers are testing their knowledge rather than exploring
their ideas, and thus, topics with a limited number of correct answers should
be avoided. Asking participants to list World War II battles, or to complete the
sentence “Most immigrants in the 19th century came from . . . ” will make
194 Barton
them feel as though they’re being quizzed, and they will shut down rather than
open up.
In addition, even when explanations are asked for, the terse nature of these
tasks does not usually lead to in-depth data on the knowledge, attitudes, or
perspectives of individuals. Freelists in particular are better used to create an
aggregate portrait of a population, as in the studies described here. Because
they provide group-level data, free lists are also particularly suited for com-
parisons of populations, and this is an important feature of studies by Epstein
(2009) and Wineburg and Monte-Sano (2008). Researchers investigating teach-
ers’ ideas about civic participation, then, probably would not use freelists to
examine individuals’ ideas, but they could ask all teachers at a school (or
throughout a district) to list “all the things you think students need to know
about democracy” or “all the behaviors that students might display to indicate
that they can act politically.” These would lead to a portrait of shared assump-
tions and could be used to compare settings—by collecting data in urban and
suburban schools in the same area, for example, or among educators in differ-
ent countries or regions. As Bernard (2006) observed: “The humble free list
has many uses. Use it a lot” (p. 305).
EXPLANATION TASKS
In the final group of elicitation techniques, participants are asked to explain

the content of materials (usually visual images) or to describe a process (such
as their own thinking or teaching). In these tasks, stimuli are used primarily
to prompt thoughts that are largely tacit or rarely articulated. Researchers fre-
quently are interested in precisely these kinds of ideas—concepts and mental
procedures that are hard to understand or access without participants’ expla-
nations, but which they take so much for granted that they find them hard
to explain. Three of the most well-known such tasks are thinking aloud,
stimulated recall, and photo-elicitation.
Thinking Aloud
Two of the more familiar forms of elicitation techniques involve “intro-

spective methods” in which participants reflect on the nature of their thinking.
The first of these methods involves what are variously known as “think alouds,”
“verbal reports,” or “protocol analysis.” In this approach, participants are asked
to report on their thinking, either while they are in the process of conducting
some task or immediately afterward. This approach is particularly useful when
researchers hope to gain insight into how participants engage in some cognitive
process, such as problem solving, decision making, second language learn-
ing, or text comprehension (Ericsson & Simon, 1993; Pressley & Afflerbach,
1995). In an individual meeting with the researcher, participants are asked to

think aloud as they work on a problem (or read some portion of text) and to
say everything that comes to mind while engaging in the task. The goal is
not for them to analyze or explain their thinking but simply to state aloud the
thoughts that occur to them. Participants are asked to speak constantly, and the
researcher’s intervention is usually limited to reminding them to speak.
Although most think-aloud research involves adults, children are also
capable of verbalizing their thoughts while engaged in reading or other tasks.
To investigate the effect of classroom investigations with historical evidence,
for example, VanSledright (2002) asked fifth-graders to think aloud as they
examined sets of written and visual sources. Before instruction, students’ ver-
bal reports indicated that they focused primarily on comprehension monitoring
strategies (such as rereading or summarizing) and intratextual analysis (reflect-
ing on the content of the source, the author’s style, and their own reactions).
After instruction, students were more likely to engage in intertextual analy-
sis, such as comparing evidence, assessing the perspective of authors relative
to each other, and drawing conclusions based on evidence. When researchers
are interested in how students mentally work through a task, such as analyzing
primary sources, think alouds are an especially useful technique.
Think-aloud research is generally done in a single sitting, with relatively
brief tasks or texts, but it can also be used in more complex ways. VanSledright
and Afflerbach (2000), for example, were interested in preservice teachers’
cognitive strategies and affective responses when reading revisionist history
texts. These texts were too long and demanding for a typical face-to-face inter-
view session, so the researchers met with participants to talk about the process
of thinking aloud and asked them to conduct recordings on their own time over
the course of the next month. They were asked to talk about how they were try-
ing to construct meaning, including how they reconciled texts with each other
and with their prior knowledge, as well as the sorts of reading, reasoning, and
thinking strategies they used as they did so. The researchers found that par-
ticipants modified their understanding of the historical period and gradually
assimilated and partially appropriated authors’ narrative accounts. In doing
so, they monitored their understanding of text, considered prior knowledge,
and evaluated authors’ claims. Methods that only compared teachers’ think-
ing before and after reading might have detected changes in their ideas, but
they would have been less able to identify the processes by which those ideas
changed. Examining such processes is an important, and largely unexplored,
avenue for research on teaching and learning in social studies (Barton, 2008).
Stimulated Recall
A second introspective technique involves stimulating participants’

description of mental processes after the fact. In many naturalistic settings,
196 Barton
participants cannot be asked to verbalize their thinking at the same time that
they are involved in ongoing activities. Teachers and students, for example,
cannot easily think aloud at the same time they are engaged in lessons. As a
result, researchers have attempted to gain insight into cognitive processes by
asking participants to recall their thinking at a later time, frequently while
they watch video recordings of lessons or lesson segments (Ericsson & Simon,
1993; Lyle, 2003; Yinger, 1986). As Yinger (1986) notes, although the ability
of such recall to accurately mirror thoughts that had occurred during recorded
events has been widely criticized, such procedures nonetheless provide impor-
tant data on participants’ reflective understanding of the nature of teaching and
learning. Stimulated recall cannot necessarily capture teachers’ thinking while

in the process of teaching, that is, but it can nonetheless spur reflection on
teaching by providing access to how teachers make sense of teaching episodes.
By prompting explanation and justification of practices, it elicits teachers’
implicit theories and otherwise tacit beliefs.
Although stimulated recall has been used primarily in studies with teach-
ers, it began as a method for conducting research with students, and it continues
to hold potential for providing insight into the process of learning. Nuthall
(1999), for example, asked upper elementary students who had been studying
science and social studies to recall their experiences and thoughts while they
watched video clips of their involvement in classroom activities. They were
asked such questions as “What was going on for you here?,” “What’s this like
for you?,” and “What’s happening here?,” along with probes that encouraged
them to talk more about their experiences and thinking (p. 13). He found that
students talked about activities primarily in terms of getting tasks completed
(usually looking for the shortest and most efficient way to complete require-
ments) and seemed unaware of their intended academic purposes. They even
viewed their teachers’ involvement as little more than annoying interference.
In addition, students did not clearly differentiate their thinking from physical
completion of the task (or from accompanying discussions with other students).
And once they had completed the activity, their thinking stopped. They may
have been surprised or confused by the solution they worked out, but resolving
that confusion was irrelevant to completing the task, and thus new information
was not fully integrated with their previous beliefs. Nuthall concluded that in
the context of classroom activities, “students act and perceive rather than reflect
and interpret” (p. 38). He further maintained, however, that students’ thoughts
during the activities (including their confusions) were still available to them
for later reflection and that it was often at these later moments rather than dur-
ing the original experience that learning actually occurred—including during
the stimulated recall interviews themselves. This is an important reminder that
interview techniques themselves can hold important intellectual benefits for
participants, particularly when they are students who are learning about the
concepts being investigated.
Photo-Elicitation
A simple but productive technique involves showing photographs to par-

ticipants (or asking them to select their own) and then asking them to talk
about what they see. Anthropologists often take photographs of local peo-
ple, places, and events and ask members of the community to talk about
them. Their reactions can reveal community values, attitudes, and beliefs, as
well as the meaning that participants attribute to aspects of the local setting
(Collier & Collier, 1986; Harper, 2002; Wagner, 1979; Wang & Burris, 1997).
Photographs can also trigger memories, and participants’ responses can illus-
trate group dynamics or provide insight into how social and cultural systems
operate (Prosser & Schwartz, 1998). In schools, photo-elicitation can serve as
a more concrete (and potentially more engaging) alternative to “grand tour”
questions in which participants are asked to describe a typical day in the setting.
This technique can be particularly useful for surfacing taken-for-granted
ideas about the social world and for revealing features of community life
that researchers might otherwise overlook (Carlsson, 2001; Harper, 1988;
Schwartz, 1989). In one study, for example, a teacher who was explaining a
photograph of herself working with students noted a girl touching the teacher’s
bracelet, and this led her to reflect on students’ interest in getting to know their
teachers personally. This reflection might not have occurred without the pres-
ence of a small detail invested with great significance (Walker & Widel, 1985).
Collier and Collier (1986) refer to this as the “can-opener effect” and note how
photographs can speed up the process of establishing rapport. Photographs can
release anecdotes and recollections that might otherwise remain buried. They
further note that because photographs often are emotionally charged, partic-
ipants sometimes use them as a stimulus for dialogues with themselves, and
this leads to the kind of fluency and deep reflection that might not come about
when responding only to verbal prompts. Collier and Collier even suggest that
it can be harder for participants to lie about their reactions to a photograph
because of their emotional salience.
Asking a variety of participants to react to photographs can be particu-
larly useful in eliciting the range of ideas that exist in a setting, because not all
participants will respond in the same ways (Banks, 2001). Their reactions and
explanations, then, can provide information on how age, role, status, or other
social and individual factors influence perspectives and how similar events
are interpreted differently within and across communities (Schwartz, 1989).
Prosser (1992), for example, showed British teachers photographs he had taken
in a variety of everyday settings at their school. One was a photograph of a lan-
guage arts text, Nine Modern Poets: An Anthology (Black, 1966), which had
been vandalized by a student so that its title appeared as “Nine Nude Puffs in an
Orgy” (puff , also spelled poof , is derogatory British slang for male homosexu-
als). The head of the school, an “‘elderly statesmen’ type” (p. 403), found the
198 Barton
image threatening, and he thought that showing the book (or the photograph)
to students would lead to further vandalism. An art teacher, on the other hand,
considered it an act of creativity and wished that more students demonstrated
such talent. Notably, none of the teachers—or the researcher—commented on
what the image had to say about gender and sexuality or whether it might reflect
a climate of homophobia in the school or the wider society. As in all research,
what participants fail to say can be just as enlightening as what they do say.
Photographs for elicitation can come from a variety of sources and be
used for differing purposes, although researchers usually select images that
they assume will have some meaning or significance for participants. These
may be generic photographs of sites within a community (such as classrooms

or corridors within participants’ own school), or they may include more spe-
cific images of participants themselves (as in the above example of the teacher
working with her students). Photographs may also be chosen to be deliber-
ately provocative or disruptive to elicit otherwise suppressed views, as in the
example of the vandalized book. Images, however, do not have to be contempo-
rary. In one study, teachers who examined photographs of themselves in earlier
stages of their careers commented on how their appearances were linked to
their professional identities as teachers at the time (Mitchell & Weber, 1998).
This kind of visual elicitation can also use moving images, as in the
“video-cued multivocal ethnography” of Tobin et al. (2009). They recorded
an entire day of activity in preschools in China, Japan, and the United States
and edited each video down to 20 minutes. They specifically looked for scenes
that had the potential to stimulate discussion and highlight disagreements about
the mission of preschools and the nature of children, such as scenes of conflict,
tension, separation, and intimacy (Tobin & Davidson, 1990). They first showed
these recordings to staff at each of the schools and asked them to explain what
was going on, assess whether it was typical, and evaluate their response to each
situation. They then showed the videos to preschool teachers at other sites in
the same countries and to staff of preschools in the other countries, and they
asked for their reactions and for ideas about how they would have handled the
situations themselves. Participants often had different understandings not only
about what teachers should do but also about what was going on in the video-
tape. In their comments, participants illustrated not only their individual ideas
but also the culturally and historically embedded constructions of childhood
and schooling from which they drew.
Photo-elicitation is an open-ended and transparent technique, but when-
ever researchers select stimulus materials, it limits participants’ ability to
represent their experiences (cf., Eldén, 2013). A form of photo-elicitation that
has become popular in recent years aims to provide greater participant input
into the research process. This approach, usually known as photovoice (Wang
& Burris, 1997), asks participants themselves to take photographs that have
meaning for them and then to explain their selections. This method is often
associated with participatory action research in which participants are asked to
identify important needs in their community and to develop ways of addressing

them. Burke, Green, and McKenna (2014), for example, investigated students’
understanding of public spaces in their neighborhoods by asking them to
take photographs of objects and places they considered “good” and those that
“needed improvement” (p. 13). Students were then asked to caption the images
and explain the meaning behind them. Tupper, Carson, Johnson, and Mangat
(2008), meanwhile, used students’ explanations of photographs they had taken
in their schools to examine the messages about citizenship conveyed there, as
well as how students negotiated the use of these spaces for interaction and iden-
tity. In both these studies, starting with students’ own representations provided
insights that researchers might not have been able to identify without insiders’
creation of materials.
CONCLUSIONS
Elicitation techniques provide alternatives to direct, verbal interview ques-

tions and are especially useful when researchers want respondents to talk about
controversial topics or ideas they have little experience discussing. The meth-
ods covered here facilitate such discussions, particularly by using concrete and
familiar tasks to explore abstract concepts, by shifting attention onto exter-
nal materials or scenarios, and by reducing power inequities. These techniques
are not foolproof, and their success is inseparable from other characteristics
of good interviews, such as researchers’ rapport with participants and their
ability to encourage conversation. Yet, with judicious selection, careful plan-
ning, sensitive implementation, and thoughtful consideration of the suitability
of tasks for given topics, populations, and circumstances, elicitation techniques
can help researchers create valuable data on topics that might otherwise be
difficult for participants to discuss.
It is important to keep in mind, though, that such methods do not entirely
transform the power relations involved in research. Even though participants
may have a greater voice in some kinds of tasks than others, their experiences
may still leave them feeling powerless about the extent to which others have
analyzed their thoughts (Tobin & Davidson, 1990). Addressing such percep-
tions may require engaging participants not only in interesting and open-ended
tasks but also in the design of research itself (e.g., Waldron, 2006). Ultimately,
researchers must remember that their data derive from particular tasks, which
are interpreted in particular ways, and that these are never free from the
influence of power-laden social contexts.
200 Barton
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KEITH C. BARTON is a Professor in the Department of Curriculum and

Instruction at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405. He can be contacted
at kcbarton@indiana.edu.

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Elicitation Techniques: Getting People to Talk

Keywords: elicitation techniques, interview research, research methods

Correspondence should be sent to Keith C. Barton, Department of Curriculum and

can facilitate such conversations by displacing the focus of interviews onto

OVERCOMING BARRIERS TO DISCUSSION

Although elicitation techniques have no single or authoritative definition,

recommended in ethnographic interviews (Spradley, 1979) is often ineffec-

at photographs can cover otherwise awkward silences, and there is no need

Collier (1986) argue, materials such as photographs can function as a third

assemble tasks that allow perspectives to emerge, asking participants them-

One of the most useful forms of elicitation involves asking participants

Another useful strategy for exploring participants’ conceptual categories

used to investigate students’ ideas about historical significance in a number of

Instead of asking participants to manipulate materials created by

Asking participants to draw a picture or diagram has two important uses.

Figure 1. Image for Eliciting Students’ Understanding of the Perspective of an

Projective techniques can be particularly useful when researchers are

specifically identified characteristics such as family closeness, coping skills,

Freelisting and Sentence Completion

One of the simplest forms of elicitation is freelisting, in which partici-

about . . . ”) or more open-ended and potentially elaborate responses (“School

teachers to . . . .” The intent of the curriculum was for teachers to provide

In the final group of elicitation techniques, participants are asked to explain

Two of the more familiar forms of elicitation techniques involve “intro-

1995). In an individual meeting with the researcher, participants are asked to

A second introspective technique involves stimulating participants’

learning. Stimulated recall cannot necessarily capture teachers’ thinking while

A simple but productive technique involves showing photographs to par-

may be generic photographs of sites within a community (such as classrooms

identify important needs in their community and to develop ways of addressing

Elicitation techniques provide alternatives to direct, verbal interview ques-

An, S. (2009). Learning US history in an age of globalization and

Barton, K. C. (2005). “Best not to forget them”: Secondary students’ judgments

ethnographic methods: Audiovisual techniques, focused group interviews,

Catterall, M., & Ibbotson, P. (2000). Using projective techniques in edu-

Gates, M. (1976). Measuring peasant attitudes to modernisation: A projective

Harper, D. (1988). Visual sociology: Expanding sociological vision. The

Middaugh, E. (2009). Adolescent reasoning about civic and political engage-

Nuthall, G. (1999, April). How students learn: The validation of a model

Schwartz, D. (1989). Visual ethnography: Using photography in qualitative

lum, 2008–2009. Wellington, New Zealand: Ministry of Education.

Waldron, F. (2006). Children as co-researchers: Developing a democratic

Wang, C., & Burris, M. A. (1997). Photovoice: Concept, methodology and

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

KEITH C. BARTON is a Professor in the Department of Curriculum and

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