Picturing ourselves in the world: Drawings, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis and the Relational Mapping Interview

Some aspects of experience can be challenging for research participants to verbalise. IPA researchers need to get ‘experience-near’ to meet their phenomenological commitments, capturing the ‘texture’ and quality of existence and placing participants in-relation-to events, objects, others, and the world. Incorporating drawing into IPA designs provides a vehicle through which participants can better explore and communicate their lifeworlds. IPA researchers also require rich accounts to fulfil their interpretative commitments. Drawing taps into multiple sensory registers simultaneously, providing polysemous data, which lends itself to hermeneutic analysis. This paper outlines a multimodal method, the Relational Mapping Interview, which was developed to understand the relational context of various forms of distress and disruption. We illustrate how the approach results in richly nuanced visual and verbal accounts of relational experience. Drawing on an “expanded hermeneutic phenomenology”, we suggest how visual data can be analysed within an IPA framework to offer significant experiential insights.