Auto-driven photo-elicitation interview method has been successfully used as an aid for in-depth interviews in many researches because it is a good way to stimulate conversations and obtain more information from the interviewees. When language is not enough to express participants’ feeling, photos could be good supplements. However, this method turned out to be a complete failure when used in a case study carried out in Chinese rural villages of Sichuan Province. Interviewees’ responses were surprisingly different to what was expected. They refused to share or take photos, so no useful data was obtained from photo-elicitation interview method.
After the interview process, a reflection of the photo-elicitation interview method was carried out.
Some reasons have been found to explain the failure. The first reason is the huge difference of income levels between participants in Chinese villages and researchers in developed countries. For researchers in developed countries like Australia, digital cameras are part of people’s daily life and are very affordable personal items. People are accustomed to use digital cameras. But for most of the villagers, digital cameras are very expensive items and are beyond their daily life. Some villagers do not know how to operate a digital camera, and some old villagers had never seen a small modern camera, so they were afraid of touching such an expensive and high-tech items in case of damaging it.
The second reason is distinct opinions about taking photos, among participants in Chinese villages and researchers. For researchers, taking photos is a neutral method to collect data and record participants’ ways of living. In contrast, for Chinese villagers, taking photos may only happen in special and important occasions and only the best part of their life can be shown in the photos.
In conclusion, the paper gives some suggestions for cross cultural data collecting and highlights the importance of doing a pilot study to test whether theoretical knowledge can be used in practice before carrying out a field study.