Visual Elicitation Qualitative Content Analysis

Visual elicitation qualitative content analysis (VEQCA) is a qualitative research approach that combines the use of visual stimuli — photographs, drawings, images, or artifacts — to prompt participant responses, and then applies systematic qualitative content analysis procedures to interpret and categorize the resulting verbal or textual data. The method harnesses the unique cognitive and communicative power of images to surface meanings that purely verbal questioning may not reach, while retaining the rigor of explicit, rule-governed content analysis.