Reporting with Juice: Vignette as a Qualitative Reporting Method
Our evaluation of the Talk of the Town artist-in-residence program at El Museo del Barrio looked at ways the program served its intended audience: immigrant communities throughout New York City that speak Indigenous and/or endangered languages. As part of data collection for the evaluation, interdisciplinary educator and evaluator Filippa Christofalou followed three different month-long artist residencies organized by El Museo in partnership with community-based organizations. Each residency focused on a different project designed to serve its specific community: a guide book for refugees and asylees from across the African diaspora, processional banners celebrating Indigenous Kichwa culture, and documentation of Indigenous Latin American medicinal healing resources through art.
In her final report, Filippa included findings drawn from her observations of the residency’s art making workshops, focus groups she conducted with participants, as well as participant surveys. Her report included several vignettes: short, narrative descriptions of events that capture mood, context, and participant relationships. I sat down to hear more about what influenced her to use the vignette approach and what advice she has for using it as a method for reporting qualitative data.
Give more of the juice
Hannah: What influenced you to write vignettes when reporting findings from this study?
Filippa: My main art making medium is photography and I use vignettes, which in photography is this darker frame around the edges of a photograph. I’ve used vignettes for almost 5 years in my photography. And I was reflecting since the day that you asked me about my use of vignettes in evaluation that the reason I was doing it was to make the scene in the photograph more dramatic, more intense, more emotional. Similarly here too, I wanted to capture the drama—not in the Americanized sense where drama is something that escalates or leads to a scene that’s too emotional (there is no such thing as too emotional), but to capture a happening, a dialogue that I bring to light.
Since my research is on embodiment in museum contexts, I try in my writing to convey events in a way that is more visceral or that invites the reader to have an emotional response, a more immersive understanding of what happened. I think qualitative stuff like research is all about that, capturing the nuances beyond “this is what they told us.” There is context, there is nuance, there are human beings, there are situations that you need to talk about. In this project there were some things that were said or were happening that would not have been fully captured if we were to extract just a quote or two. So, how do I report what I observed in a way that does justice but also gives more of the juice of what was happening at the moment?
A Vignette from the Evaluation Report: What’s in a Name
The artist-in-residence began the session by inviting both new and returning participants to share their names. When one participant asked, “which name should I share—my name from Nigeria or the one I use here?” the artist-in-residence adapted, asking everyone to share the name they grew up with and its meaning.
What followed was a ripple of smiles and conversations. Participants began chatting, not just about the meanings of their names but about the stories behind them, bringing to light the richness of their lives before arriving in the United States. The activity transformed a simple introduction into a moment of connection and self-discovery.
Relationships, context, and body language
Hannah: What details do you think are important to capture in a vignette?
Filippa: Three big things come to mind: relationships, context, and body language. So first, I think about the relationships that are at play in the moment—who is in the room? Then, context. Is there something happening in the background, like music playing, snacks being shared, artwork on the walls that you can sense might matter to the interpretation of the scene even if the participants do not talk about it directly? And third, what is happening with our bodies at the moment? What is the quality of peoples’ voices, describing if someone sounds stressed or emotional.
For example, imagine in a focus group that someone is talking and then another person stands up in the middle of their sentence to get some water. And you notice the person who is talking sees that, and then you observe that they switch gears and change the topic. What if they felt that people were not paying attention to them…? How do you capture that possibility and dynamics in an evaluation report? It's your interpretation that the person stopped talking because of the other one stood up, but also if I quoted what the person started to say—yes it would be a quote, but also it is not a complete thought or a complete portrayal of the moment because that person stopped in the middle and we’re not sure why. I am suspecting why, and I want to give this opportunity to the reader, too. By sharing the moment through a vignette, you allow the reader to interpret for themselves how complete or incomplete the idea is.
A Vignette from the Evaluation Report: Ritual as Connection
A Kichwa member began by speaking in Kichwa, offering an introduction about the history and significance of the earth as a symbol of birth. They then explained the ritual of creating a collective prayer and honoring the “grand wishes of our ancestors.” Initially, participants—some of whom were Kichwa—were hesitant, observing quietly. Slowly, they began to engage, placing beans on the floor to create a symbolic act of “planting a seed.”
The atmosphere was ceremonial and unhurried, with moments of quiet reflection punctuated by shared action. At one point, food was brought in, prompting some participants to pause, take a bite, and then rejoin the ritual. As time passed, the space transformed; conversations sparked, prayers were shared, and strangers began exchanging thoughts about the profound symbolism of planting seeds, both literally and metaphorically. What started as a tentative ritual evolved into a vibrant and interconnected moment of shared meaning and community.
Vignettes as problem solving
Hannah: How much did our decision not to record the program’s workshops play into your decision to use vignettes in the evaluation report?
Filippa: I was already familiar with the idea of vignette, but for this specific project it was problem solving. What do I do when I have such rich data that is sensitive, that I don't have recordings of, but I do have extensive notes? How do I capture the richness, but also how do I capture it in a way that is sensitive to the fact that it will be shared with the client and become somewhat public? So in this case, vignettes offer a way to report sensitive information without being too exposing. The way I approach problem-solving is shaped by my experiences with art encounters and my practice as an artist. This, in turn, supports the argument for advocating the arts in education.The arts cultivate creativity, critical thinking, and adaptability—you need these three to work your way through a problem!
A Vignette from the Evaluation Report: Shared Food, Shared Connection
The room buzzed with conversation as participants worked on their art projects. The dialogue flowed easily, jumping from one subject to another—journeys to this country that included atrocities at the border and painful memories, experiences in New York City, and even the topic of medicine. Despite the fact that only two of the women seemed to know each other beforehand, the exchanges carried the warmth and familiarity of old friends.
When the food arrived, the atmosphere shifted slightly as people began serving themselves traditional Mexican dishes. The act of offering food carried a certain weight: a gesture of hospitality, care, and cultural connection. This wasn’t just food; it was food from the communities, prepared with traditions and memories that spoke to resilience and identity.
Soon enough, they invited me, Filippa, to join them. I accepted after a while, observing as several women took small sprigs of cilantro, lightly tapping their food with it before chewing some on its own. I noticed the artist-in-residence mimicking the gesture. Curious, I asked her about it. She paused, then said with a soft laugh, "I’m not really sure—I saw them doing it, so I thought I’d do it too.” The simplicity of the act—this unspoken honoring of a shared tradition—seemed to resonate deeply with some participants who noticed the exchange, and smiled back.
Vignettes as a decolonizing, feminist method
Hannah: There's something beautiful about the way you wrote these vignettes that's very different from other types of prose writing, especially in the context of research and evaluation. What advice do you have for someone to be able to write these in a way that is creative and emotional with the (false) notion of objectivity that researchers are supposed to bring to the table?
Filippa: I did my homework and I was surprised to learn (but also not) that vignettes as embedded visuals in writing, in the Victorian era which—ding dong!—is the peak of colonial power, at the moment where museums (as we know them today) are being born and the idea of childhood education as a means of establishing empire is gaining currency. And we know that with colonialism and imperialism comes notions like objectivity and rigor and perfectionism, which are very white supremacist colonial ideas of living life (and doing research). If you want to go down that road, you have to silence the body and the personal and the emotional. So, vignette is a counter. It came at that moment as a way to say “here's what happened” but also with context and emotions and nuance—to bring together art and life.
We also know feminist authors use vignettes—Black feminism in particular is concerned with decolonizing the body. Through writing in vignettes, feminist authors document and communicate meaning in a way that feels personal.
On another layer, when writing vignettes I use what I call “fleshy” language—more visceral language to get at what is happening in the moment. When I work with museum educators on Body Based Pedagogies, I share examples from somatic healing practitioner Meenadchi’s work on communicating body sensations. For example, instead of “wet,” is it soaked, soggy, slimy? Instead of “smooth,” is it glassy, velvety, rounded? [You can find the rest of the body sensations list by request here!] I consciously choose words that evoke things to the reader, and I ask: What emerges for you? My intention is that the reader—not just me—also experiences the moment through my vignette with words but also emotions.
So how do you pay attention to what is happening within you at the moment and how do you start typing without filtering and having false notions of objectivity and so-called rigor as an end goal? To get concrete: I read a lot of poetry and prose. I also do a lot of freestyle writing, which I don't know if it’s because English is my second language, but my sentences when I do freestyle writing are very short, not like three-page academic sentences. And I choose words that are more fleshy, they evoke something.
Conclusion from Hannah
Evoking something—in many ways that’s what qualitative research is all about! Hopefully my conversation with Filippa demonstrates how vignette can be a method for reporting moments that happen during data collection that require more than a quote to convey. This ability is even more critical when reporting culturally specific or sensitive data that needs context, embodiment, multiple perspectives—juice!—to do it justice. By expanding our qualitative reporting toolbox, evaluators can play an important role in disrupting false and harmful binaries between rigor and subjectivity, truth and creativity, art and life.
