Being visible: PhotoVoice as assessment for children in a school-based psychiatric setting.
BACKGROUND
Recovery-oriented mental health services empower all clients, including youth and their families, to be actively involved in directing their own care. In order to develop person-driven interventions, clinicians must understand what matters from their perspective. Thus, recovery-oriented assessments need self-report measures that adequately capture the domains and content that matter to a range of particular persons.


OBJECTIVE
This study examined if and how PhotoVoice, a participatory research method used to empower and highlight the unique experiences of vulnerable groups, could be used as a recovery-oriented self-report measure for children with a mental health disorder.


METHODS
We used PhotoVoice to engage four children with mental health related disorders at a day hospital program for severe behavioural disorders. The children, as co-researchers in this participatory approach, created life books from photographs and images of what mattered to them across nine sessions. To examine the PhotoVoice process, we used ethnographic methods, including child interviews and participant observations in their classes and at recess before, during and after the weekly sessions. Our overarching narrative-phenomenological theoretical framework focused data collection and analysis on what mattered most to the children.


RESULTS
The PhotoVoice method engaged and empowered the children in articulating what mattered in their everyday lives from their perspective that resulted in a novel, child-generated domain of 'mattering to others' for future self-report measures, and facilitated changes that generalized outside of the group. We illustrate these results by drawing a particularly illustrative case example from the study.


CONCLUSIONS
The PhotoVoice method foregrounded children's perspectives on what matters more explicitly than clinical or parent perspective on function.


CONCLUSIONS
The participatory philosophy and methods of PhotoVoice provides a viable approach to recovery-oriented self-report measures as well as an occupation-based assessment and intervention.
a Department of Child Psychiatry, Center for Child Development and Mental Health, Jewish General Hospital , Montreal , Quebec , Canada.|b School of Physical and Occupational Therapy, Faculty of Medicine , McGill University , Montreal , Quebec , Canada.
Vanessa
V
Greco
b School of Physical and Occupational Therapy, Faculty of Medicine , McGill University , Montreal , Quebec , Canada.
Heather Christine
HC
Lambert
b School of Physical and Occupational Therapy, Faculty of Medicine , McGill University , Montreal , Quebec , Canada.
Melissa
M
Park
D002648:Child; D003631:Day Care, Medical; D006801:Humans; D007407:Interviews as Topic; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000523:psychology*; D008605:Mental Health Services; D033262:Narration; D009788:Occupational Therapy; D010781:Photography / Q000379:methods*; D012649:Self Concept; D057566:Self Report
Child; life books; mental health; participatory research; photovoice method