Paper short abstract:

Community empowerment is key to capturing valuable information that researchers cannot envisage. Therefore, unlocking community hidden treasure requires the use of bottom up approaches that empowers the research participants. Therefore, participatory photography is one key method in such processes.

Paper long abstract:

In exploratory research, photographs are used as a tool for generating an in-depth discussion and reflection during the interview process which leads into a deeper understanding of the subject by the researcher (Creswell, 2014). In a research seeking to find out people's emotional bonding to their original home during flooding induced resettlement, participatory photography data collection method was used.

Participants were trained to use the camera handed to them by the researcher to capture significant features shaping their emotional attachment to their environment. Grant et al. (2015) indicated that Participatory photography is one of the bottom up data collection methods that allows the researcher to explore broadly through community driven discussion unlike the conventional way of generating the discussion based on the researcher's preconceived ideas. Participatory photography method could be done either by using the photographs collected by the researcher or the research participants themselves taking photos of their community and generate a discussion based on those photographs. Therefore, in this study, the researcher allowed the communities to take the photographs within their community as in this way the participants were empowered to own the process as they were well knowledgeable of their community rather than basing the discussion on pre-set ideas by the researcher. This was seen to be effective to collect valuable information that the researcher could not think about. This also motivated the research participants who were happy to have the camera and take photographs within their community at their own convenient time.