Picturing Topics Related to Change: Drawing and Its Underlying Elicitation Processes

Abstract

This article suggests including drawing, a participative visual method, when designing organizational change research. It is based on a comparative analysis of three research protocols that have integrated drawing as a data collection method. Examining how drawing has been used in these studies leads to the identification of four elicitation processes—contextualizing, exemplifying, focusing, and reflecting—by which drawing gives access to data that would be more challenging to collect with conventional research methods alone. The article shows that these processes bring the participants’ emotions, lived experiences, and cultural influences to light in ways that may considerably enrich organizational change research. It ends by providing a set of guidelines on how to employ drawing in triangulation with other data collection methods.