Picturing Community: Exploring the Concept of Community with Adults Living in Peer-Run Supportive Housing

Background and Purpose: Community is a slippery concept.   It is sometimes encapsulated within bounded groups (e.g. mental health community, supportive housing community) and sometimes broadened and treated as synonymous with a demographic class (the African American community), a spatially bound neighborhood, or society at large. 

Photovoice is a participatory research method that uses visual elicitation and group discussion to explore how people make sense of community and their relationship to it. Members of vulnerable populations are generally asked to photograph and discuss aspects of their community that need attention (e.g. safety, nutrition, healthcare).  For this study, we asked tenants of supportive housing who had histories of mental illness, homelessness, and incarceration, to photograph and discuss  “community” itself.  In doing so, we allowed both method and data to facilitate definitions of community. 

Methods: Seven individuals were recruited through their involvement in a peer-run supportive housing program to take part in a 6-week photovoice project. Participants were initially asked to take photos that represented their ideas of community and then discuss their photographs in individual interviews and focus groups. For subsequent meetings participants helped direct the topic to be photographed, which included “good” and “bad” communities and community health. Qualitative analyses of 35 individual interview transcripts, 5 focus group transcripts, and 350 photographs were used to expand on many of the themes that were derived through group discussion.

Results: Analysis of the data collected suggests that understandings of community emerge through collective narration and story telling.  This happened through narratives that constructed 1) shared pasts; 2) shared presents; and 3) shared futures. Rather than defining community as a group of individuals with common experiences of supportive housing, the participants extended their definitions beyond the scope of the host agency and “supportive housing community” by discussing their shared relationship to the world they had documented in their individual photographs. Community was not simply “within” the group, but was evoked in sometimes surprising moments of identification and commonality with the world “out there” among individuals with otherwise disparate life experiences. Participants in these conversations were ‘doing community’ in reference to vastly different kinds of spaces, experiences, and images. By defining community, participants were creating community.

Conclusions and Implications: Our findings challenged the notion that the community is a substantive concept, composed of particular kinds of spaces or experiences. Apropos to method itself, photovoice provided an actionable means to resolving the question identified. In participating in the study and employing the photovoice method to define community, individuals understood their commonalities beyond the walls of the group and created community in effect devising a participatory-based community integration intervention for individuals who often struggle to find belonging in their identity-based and location-based communities.  Implications are drawn for other participatory methods that can efface the often rigid boundary between integration into a service community and integration into the community at large.