What Psychology Students See When They Photograph Inclusion

When psychology students in Slovakia were handed cameras and asked to capture inclusion in their everyday lives, the pictures they brought back revealed far more than a single definition of the concept. A research team at Comenius University Bratislava asked 223 bachelor’s-level psychology students to photograph examples of inclusion around them and to accompany each image with a verbal narration. Analysing the resulting 223 photographs and their written comments, the researchers identified three distinct themes in how these future psychologists represent inclusion: sensitivity to diversity and its barriers, accessibility through compensatory aids, and inclusion understood as a safe space. The findings, published in Frontiers in Education, suggest that photovoice, a participatory visual method developed in the 1990s, can serve as a relevant tool for assessing how students conceptualise inclusion, and that the images captured dimensions of the concept that conventional survey methods may overlook.

The study embedded a photovoice activity into a compulsory course on school and educational psychology, part of the standard curriculum preparing students for all psychology specialisations. Participants, whose mean age was 22.3 years and 83 percent of whom were women, attended two facilitated sessions. In the first, they were introduced to the photovoice method, the ethical use of photographs, and the steps of working with visual material. Each participant then had one week to capture a single photo illustrating an example of inclusion in their everyday life, upload it to an academic e-learning system, and provide a verbal comment. Faces were blurred or covered where needed, and participants knew in advance that their images would be shared with the group and analysed. Although 293 students took the course, only those who submitted both a visual and a verbal comment meeting the photovoice criteria entered the final dataset of 223 items.

The second session brought the images into collective view. The anonymised photographs were displayed in an online gallery, and students discussed them in small groups of four or five using the SHOWED technique, a structured sequence of questions asking what participants see in an image, what is really happening, how it relates to their lives, why the situation exists, how the group can become empowered through new understanding, and what can be done. Groups then shared their reflections with the lecturer and the whole cohort of roughly twenty students. The sessions and discussions themselves were not recorded; the researchers analysed only the anonymised photos and the accompanying individual narrations. Data collection spanned three academic years, and the authors of the published pictures gave additional consent for publication. The study received approval from the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences at Comenius University Bratislava.

Photovoice as a methodology was introduced in the 1990s by Wang and Burris as a participatory action research strategy designed to give voice to unheard groups. It encourages people to reflect on their lived experience, and its results can inform policymakers seeking to understand the realities of diverse communities. The process of taking photographs, giving them meaning, and discussing that meaning with others allows participants to present their perceptions and represent their community. Since its inception, the method has been applied across public health, mental health, learning disabilities, LGBTI communities, and environmental issues, and it has been used in education for youth counselling, peer-run anti-stigma interventions, supporting learners with special educational needs, and even anxiety reduction for individuals with mental health problems. In this study, the researchers drew on photovoice studies of social representations and followed established recommendations for photovoice research and for quality in visual participatory research.

The analytical approach was deliberately tailored to visual material. The team used thematic analysis of visual and verbal photovoice content, extended by polytextual thematic analysis for visual data, an approach the authors describe as epistemologically neutral. Polytextual analysis assumes that texts and images are predicated on one another, so the photographs and their verbal comments were read together rather than in isolation. All authors had access to the complete dataset, and each led several small group discussions, taking notes that fed into the analysis. The first author conducted an initial examination, generating preliminary codes from the images and comments. The analysis then proceeded in two phases: first, examining all images to identify categories of diversity, guided by the question of who needs inclusion; second, identifying representations of inclusion, asking how inclusion is presented in the photovoice images and comments. Coding was initially inductive, with codes subsequently organised into thematic categories, each image assigned to one category. Themes were refined collaboratively through reflective discussion rather than by seeking inter-coder agreement, and the final themes were interpreted through a theory-informed approach approved by all co-authors.

The first analytical phase revealed seven categories of diversity in the images: physical, covering physical disabilities or disadvantages; sensory, covering visual or hearing impairments; cognitive and learning, covering learning disorders and other barriers to learning; social, covering cultural, linguistic, and ethnic differences; gender and sexuality; age; and a generic category of metaphoric representations of individual differences, images of simply being different. The authors note that these categories are comparable to those reported in the existing literature. The breadth of the categories shows that students did not confine inclusion to disability alone but extended it across the full range of human difference they observe in their social contexts.

The second phase produced three themes describing different representations of inclusion. The first, sensitivity, captured awareness of diversity and of barriers to inclusion. Photographs and comments in this theme showed barriers rather than solutions: elderly people excluded from online communication because they lack digital skills, school buildings inaccessible to people with physical disabilities because of too many stairs and doors, non-binary students excluded when only gendered bathrooms are available, or left-handed people feeling excluded in a world created mostly for right-handed people. The researchers describe this theme as having a dual layer of meaning: it reflects participants’ awareness of barriers to inclusion while simultaneously capturing their sensitivity to the realities faced by others. Notably, the images portrayed existing inequalities and everyday exclusions rather than inclusive practices or remedies.

The second theme, accessibility, covered mainly images of physical and organisational compensatory aids for a variety of specific conditions. Here, inclusion appeared as compensation for differences and barriers, enabling participation, socialising, or access to environments and content that would otherwise be hard to reach. Students photographed braille signs in elevators for sight-challenged people, subtitles and translators that include students of different languages, elevators and special chairs that help people with physical disabilities reach education, expanded food options such as vegetarian, gluten-free, and lactose-free meals in the school canteen, special educators and assistants enabling a girl with autistic spectrum disorder to attend a standard school, and audiobooks that allow people with dyslexia or poor eyesight to enjoy stories. The authors interpret this theme as reflecting, to an extent, the medical model of disability, which frames disability or diversity primarily as a condition requiring treatment, intervention, or compensation.

The third theme, inclusion as a safe space, moved beyond identifying difference or barriers toward the psychological and social contexts of adaptability and acceptance of diversity. These images and comments often drew on generic or social categories and highlighted tolerance, empathy, acceptance, and mutual respect: not excluding a classmate because of her skin colour, working together at one table without making differences, everyone in a class activity having the same power, voice, and decision-making authority, or being kind and empathetic to all regardless of race, language, age, or other differences. The authors link this theme to the social and interactional models of inclusion, which emphasise removing societal barriers and advocate for the rights and agency of individuals, portraying lived experience as shaped by environmental and attitudinal obstacles rather than inherent deficits. The coexistence of these models within the same dataset, ranging from individualised, deficit-based views to systemic and interactional perspectives, illustrates the complexity of how future professionals conceptualise inclusion.

The researchers argue that this duality supports the importance of educational approaches that critically engage students with the dimensions of inclusion, ensuring that the voices and lived experiences of marginalised groups inform inclusive practice. They also connect the findings to psychological safety, the sense of being safe enough to express oneself without fear of judgment, rejection, or negative consequences. In their reading, the variability in how inclusion was conceptualised suggests that psychological safety is not only an outcome of inclusive environments but also a prerequisite for developing more complex, interactional understandings of it. Educational settings that intentionally cultivate psychological safety may enhance students’ willingness to question deficit-based assumptions, reflect on their own biases, and engage in open dialogue, strengthening their capacity to support inclusive practices in future professional roles. This matters because psychologists are often expected to serve as supporters and advocates of inclusive practices in communities, schools, and workplaces, yet far less is known about their views than about those of pre-service and in-service teachers, who dominate the inclusion literature.

The authors are candid about the study’s limitations. Subjectivity is a significant issue, both in participants’ image selection and in researchers’ interpretation; participants may prioritise socially desirable subjects when photographing, biasing the representation of their experiences. To mitigate this, the team collected over two hundred photographs to check whether images repeated themselves and involved five researchers in the sessions and analysis. The researchers also did not systematically assess participants’ previous experiences with inclusive education or collect written feedback about the sessions, which they suggest for future designs. Moreover, the photovoice activity was embedded within educational sessions rather than implemented as a fully participatory research approach; future work should allow participants a more active, participant-driven role. Even with these caveats, the study demonstrates that photovoice can function as a relevant method for assessing representations of inclusion among students, revealing emotional and social dimensions of the concept that traditional survey methods may overlook, while simultaneously supporting active learning, individual and group reflection, and the co-creation of educational content in the training of future psychologists.

Subject of Research: Photovoice analysis of psychology students' visual representations of inclusion

Article Title: Images of inclusion: a photovoice study of psychology students’ representations of inclusion

Article References: Sokolová, L., Černickaja, K., Selecká, T., Šaffo, M., & Tóth, P. (2026). Images of inclusion: a photovoice study of psychology students’ representations of inclusion. Frontiers in Education, 11, Article 1976347. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1976347

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2026.1976347

Keywords: photovoice, inclusion, psychology students, social representations, diversity, accessibility, psychological safety, educational psychology, qualitative research, visual methods, disability models, Slovakia