Moving verbal research methods to visual’s, a shift of paradigm from words to metaphorical images

One of the most striking developments across the social sciences in the past decade has been the growth of research methods using visual materials. The usage of visual images in research as a data collection tool is a novel idea. Furthermore, there is not a proposed framework and instruction to convert verbal discourse into visual materials.This paper aims to present a framework for converting verbal sentences into visual material, especially metaphorical images, to be used in visual research methodologies. In this research, the usage of images is not directed to extract the interpretations of the participant through interviews or focus groups. But this investigation concentrates only on providing researchers with an approach to create appropriate images to be used in the data collection phases of the research.

Keywords:

metaphorical images , visual research methods , metaphors , verbal illustrating , visual research