The graffiti method

During the years 1999-2002 a national three-year research project was undertaken in Australia to investigate both the perceived barriers to the provision of midwifery care within maternity services, and the strategies to overcome these barriers. At the start, the researchers on the Australian Midwifery Action Project (AMAP 2003) were confronted with a seemingly impossible task. The question was: how to access and engage a cross section of the Australian midwifery workforce who represented the profession across the breadth of the continent? There are approximately 10,000 practicing midwives currently working in Australia, and they are scattered over a country that encompasses eight state and territory boundaries, and a land mass the size of Europe. With an objective to enlist the responses of the widest possible sample of midwives and being mindful of their busy day to day lives, we chose a method that fits closest to the metaphorical notion of graffiti. We saw graffiti as the tool for describing how we connect with the complex reality within and around us at a certain moment within our existence. It will interest researchers such as midwives and others who often rely on limited resources to record the views of women and other marginalised groups. It has the benefit of not requiring a lot of time to respond, and the added dimension of a visual interpretation beyond the meaning related by text. Graffiti is an age old pursuit and although it has different contextual meanings, the immediacy of it and its universally understood medium make it an attractive method for gathering thoughts and ideas. This is the first time such a method has been described. The paper presented here takes the reader on an explorative journey, briefly into the realms of the writings of modern French theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Claire Parnet, Felix Guattari and Roland Barthes, and the feminist theorist, Elizabeth Grosz whose work provides some of the theoretical underpinnings. The method was used in the Midwives Voices study that was published in the Australian Midwifery Journal (Brodie 2002).