City Research Online

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss how we used emojis – now ubiquitous in everyday digital communication – as an elicitation tool within semi-structured focus group interviews with young women. We reflect on the affordances and limitations we encountered in using emoji elicitation. We find that emoji elicitation offers most of the established benefits of other forms of visual elicitation (including photography and drawing) but with additional key advantages of speed, low costs and accessibility – for both participants and researchers. Emoji elicitation effectively produced more equitable research relations and facilitated nuanced and meaningful discussions about sensitive topics and complex emotions, about the present, past and future. We critically reflect on the limitations of emoji elicitation for certain groups compared to other creative methods, before concluding that it offers significant potential advantages for social researchers across academic disciplines. Overall, this paper extends knowledges about the use and affordances of visual elicitation methods by demonstrating the value of emoji elicitation as a pragmatic and powerful research tool in qualitative social research.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Copyright © 2026, the authors. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Publisher Keywords:	focus groups; elicitation; visual elicitation; emojis; creative methods
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HM Sociology H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform
Departments:	School of Policy & Global Affairs School of Policy & Global Affairs > Department of Sociology & Criminology
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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