About the creator: Robert Chase, creator of Vidaview Life Story Board: “I am Assistant Professor in the College of Community and Global Health, Rady Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg Canada since 1997, where I am a non-tenured academic physician practising occupational health at the MFL Occupational Health Centre in Winnipeg.
The research goal I developed the Life Story Board (LSB), as an innovative visual interview tool in international project work with children in settings of armed conflict, such as Iraq (1992), Afghanistan (1995), Sri Lanka (1994-2000), Uganda (2007). It was my goal to design a practical, more engaging visual modality that overcomes limitations of standard psychometric scales and questionnaires, which fail to elicit or represent and record someone’s account of lived experience, from their vantage point. In Canada, research in Winnipeg with school counsellors, workshops with Indigenous BSW students, and pilot tests with refugee children refined the design, leading to production in 2015 of a practical toolkit by his small company Vidaview Information System Ltd.
The Life Story Board kit consists of a magnet receptive play board with coloured zones; sets of cards; graphic markers; and annotation system with which to represent salient elements of someone’s narrative. [link to examples] Storyboarding is a versatile, dialogical process, that accompanies the verbal mode of interaction.
The LSB process opens ways to elicit, share and process the dialogical interaction and visualize the conversation matter. The co-creation of a lifescape grounds and supports the enquiry process, and facilitates meaningful engagement in research interviews and counselling settings. It is a versatile and open system, that combines features of the genogram, eco-map, body map, and timeline, to represent meaningful narrative elements: external- people, places, occurrences, and internal- thoughts, feelings, beliefs. Surfaces are writable for notation; customized assortments of graphic and text markers are displayed on ‘palettes’ make the kit ‘fit for purpose’. Storyboarding has limitless possibilities and wide potential applications!
Origin story of the Life Story Board Life Story Board methods developed over exploratory research collaborations in Sri Lanka with a play-based arts program for war-affected children, and pilot tests with humanitarian NGOs in affected settings internationally, and with indigenous and newcomer communities in Winnipeg, Canada. In 2010 he started Vidaview Information Systems Ltd, for small-scale production of Life Story Board kits. for more, see The Story of the Life Story Board
At the University of Manitoba the Life Story Board Research Program formed around collaborations around teaching graduate students in Community Health and Social Work, and research projects.
Life Story Board Research in qualitative interview methods: Since 2010 at the University of Manitoba, collaborators in LSB qualitative stories have six peer-reviewed publications including a review (2019). Internationally, adoption of LSB by research teams in New Zealand, Australia, Germany and Kyrgyzstan led to five further publications. The list of publications is posted here https://lifestoryboard.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/LSB-Research-publications-list.pdf
Life Story Board fundamentally changes the interaction and experience of an interview, in ways that help overcome challenges of language, culture, stigma, difficult community settings, etc. The system is versatile and adapts to diverse modes of enquiry, application setting and study design.
LSB has demonstrated strengths in qualitative and mixed methods research. Data elicitation typically generates audio transcript for content analysis. Several researchers took a ‘life, or health journey’ approach to the guided interview and storyboarding process, such as: Maori university students in New Zealand (Dunedin, 2023), the history of harm reduction in people who inject drugs (Ottawa, 2015); the impact of historic trauma on HIV treatment adherence and health promoting practices among Indigenous men (Vancouver, 2018); transnational identity of recent Philippino youth immigrants in Toronto (2018); the migration stories of newcomer food processing workers (2016) and HIV+ immigrant African women (2017) in Winnipeg. Examples from various research projects are highlighted in this PDF
Life Story Board in clinical applications In the setting of counselling and psychotherapy, Life Story Board can map out salient elements external and internal, of a difficult issue or situation, and its context, to see what you are talking about, sharing and feeling. LSB opens visual, tactile and dialogical modes of engagement, interaction and cognition.
Life Story Board integrates with psychotherapeutic approaches and skills such as narrative therapy, play therapy, art therapy, cognitive processing, CBT, and mindfulness. Storyboarding one’s own life situations for a felt experience enhances the practitioner’s skill as therapist-guide.
In the practice setting, LSB offers an alternative approach when conventional talk therapy encounters limitations, due to e.g. literacy, trauma, culture, stigma. Users highlight its usefulness in client assessment, and how its use shifts locus of control, strengthens trust-building and therapeutic alliance.
For new practitioners, comfort and confidence with LSB develops with exploration and practice, adapting it to their approach and style, setting and client.