Intro to Participatory Photo Mapping (PPM) and Using Participatory Photo Mapping (PPM) to Engage Communities

Participatory Photo Mapping (PPM) is an integrative tool for documenting and communicating the experience of place to community stakeholders and decision-makers, discussed in a series of YouTube videos from a March 2010 workshop at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. In this workshop, focused for health researchers and clinicians engaged in community-based collaborative projects, Suzanne Galoucher and her colleague Dr. David Brown introduced PPM techniques and provided illustrations of its applications. The workshop also addressed critical aspects of community-research partnerships in such projects.

As stated by the authors, distinct from the Photo Voice technique, PPM is a tool for exploring the experience of place and for communicating this experience to community stakeholders and decision-makers - surveying communities and leveraging decisionmaking at the policy level. The aim of PPM is to engage people in participatory processes that are grounded in their lived experience of place in order to generate and transfer knowledge about how the attributes of people interact with attributes of place to inform behaviour. The PPM project described in this presentation showed, by way of illustration, how to use the tool for community-based research on environmental health.

The PPM method, as illustrated in the MS Word document linked below and described in the videos, combines: photography, narrative interviews, and mapping. The information gathering is community driven. It is prepared for presentation to diverse audiences through computer-based PowerPoint presentations with computer generated maps to locate information described in photos and narratives. According to the document, PPM allows users to:

1. "assess the community and environmental contributions to health, safety and well-being;
2. address peoples’ perceptions of their neighborhood environments;
3. identify environmental factors that impact health and well-being;
4. identify community supports and barriers to health and well-being; and
5. present this information to stakeholders and decision-makers." 
   

 

The process uses the following steps:

• Step 1: Provide participants with digital cameras and Global Positioning System (GPS) units and have them photograph their neighbourhood, documenting routine use of community and recreation environments.
• Step 2: Use photographs to guide narrative interview sessions during which open dialogue reveals emerging themes attached to particular images and places.
  
• Step 3: Map images and narratives as part of a neighbourhood-level geographic information system (GIS).
  
• Step 4: Use insights gained to communicate information to community stakeholders and decision-makers in order to spark action.