Picturing Stigma: A Visual Content Analysis of Photographs in Media Stories about Homelessness

Background and Purpose: Media coverage influences public awareness of social problems and has the potential to perpetuate or reduce stigma regarding issues such as homelessness. Despite this, little research has systematically examined homelessness-related media coverage, particularly photographs. The purpose of this study was to address this gap by investigating the following research question: How and to what extent do features of photographs accompanying media stories about homelessness—including subject eye contact, subject identification, presence of homelessness paraphernalia, and presence of housing—reflect stigma about homelessness and its causes?

Methods: This study applied content analysis methodology to address the research question. We used the Google News search tool to generate a sampling frame of all search results for the keyword “homeless*” for nine randomly selected dates from 2019. Results included news items from traditional media sources (e.g. newspapers, television and radio stations) as well as online-only news websites. Stories were excluded if they did not address homelessness in the United States or contain a photograph. To reduce the influence of prior search patterns on the results, we cleared the browsing history prior to carrying out the search for each date. This sampling strategy yielded 167 unique photographs, at which point we determined thematic saturation was reached. Our team developed a codebook based on the research question and prior studies. To enhance rigor, two coders independently coded the photographs, meeting regularly to compare codes and resolve discrepancies. After coding, we ran descriptive statistics.

Results: Nearly half (43%) of the photographs contained a homeless person. Homeless subjects were shown making eye contact (full or partial) only 27% of the time; instead, they were frequently shot from behind, looking down, sleeping, or with their eyes obscured by sunglasses or hats. Full names were provided in captions for 18% of homeless subjects. A large subset of photos (40%) featured non-homeless persons (e.g. politicians, charity workers, bystanders); in these, non-homeless subjects demonstrated full or partial eye contact 58% of the time and were named in 42% of captions. More than one-third (35%) of photographs showed homelessness paraphernalia, such as tents and shopping carts. Although 63% of the media stories focused on solutions to addressing homelessness, only 11% of photographs showed any type of housing.

Conclusions and Implications: The results of this study indicate that media photographs often reflect and perpetuate homelessness stigma, by depicting homeless individuals in dehumanizing ways (e.g. without naming or eye contact) and emphasizing homelessness paraphernalia. Depicting homelessness in this way downplays structural causes and suggests a dominant narrative of street homelessness that obscures other forms of homelessness, such as doubling up and couch-surfing. Leveraging social work science for social change requires attention to media messaging. Future studies can build from these results to analyze nuances in homelessness media coverage and photography (e.g. existence of racial and gender stereotypes in coverage) and explore research-practice partnerships for disrupting stigma, for example through participatory action research and photovoice to disseminate new narratives of homelessness and its causes and solutions.