2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This methods full paper presents a validated protocol for incorporating participatory visual methods into qualitative engineering education research. Engineering education researchers increasingly seek to understand how individuals navigate and make sense of their organizational lives, including those complex interactions with classrooms, departments, and institutional cultures that shape learning, belonging, and academic success. Yet traditional elicitation methods such as interviews and surveys often capture only participants’ verbal accounts, overlooking the dynamic, contextual, and affective nature of these experiences over time.

Participatory visual methods offer an expanded repertoire for studying organizational life by inviting participants to visually represent and reflect on their interactions within educational ecosystems. Through visual artifacts, participants externalize tacit experiences, relationships, and emotions that are often difficult to articulate through words alone. The theoretical orientation of this work draws on sociocultural and ecological perspectives of learning, positioning participants as co-interpreters of their lived realities and emphasizing the value of multimodal representation for revealing complexity in educational systems.

The paper introduces a validated participatory visual methods protocol, developed and refined through iterative application across multiple qualitative studies in engineering education. The protocol integrates two complementary approaches, journey maps and emotional journey maps, to engage participants in the co-generation of qualitative data. We illustrate its use through two ongoing studies in our research group: (1) journey maps within a longitudinal study of community college transfer students’ self-adjustment experiences, and (2) emotional journey maps in a cross-sectional study of graduate students’ responses to competence expectations. In both contexts, visual artifacts complemented semi-structured interviews and were examined through an interpretive artifact analysis that considered narrative content, symbolic representation, and contextual relationships among visual and verbal data. This multimodal analysis identified patterns of meaning-making and emotional regulation across time and context.

Validation of the protocol was achieved through cross-study comparison, researcher reflexivity, and participant feedback confirming the clarity, accessibility, and analytic utility of each visual method. The paper synthesizes methodological insights to highlight shared challenges such as managing researcher influence, balancing creativity with structure, and integrating visual and verbal data during analysis. Finally, we discuss how the validation framework may be extended to other participatory approaches, such as photovoice, to strengthen methodological rigor and transferability across visual research designs.

By articulating this protocol, the paper contributes a replicable, data-informed framework for engineering education researchers seeking to engage participants more fully in qualitative inquiry. It provides practical guidance for designing, implementing, and validating participatory visual studies that enhance reflexivity, support methodological transparency, and capture the complex, developmental experiences that define organizational life in engineering education.