The Community Credit research project explores pathways for trusted collaboration between credit unions and the communities they serve. To understand the experiences of people historically underserved by the consumer financial services industry, we focused in particular on the lived experience of low-income residents in Southern California. As part of a larger, mixed-methods study, in 2022 we conducted a five-week photovoice workshop exploring participants’ economic lives and experiences with consumer financial services. Photovoice is a community-based participatory research method in which participants narrate and analyze their lived experiences using photography. This data set contains the transcripts from the photovoice sessions after excluding any personally identifying data.

All study materials and procedures were approved by the University of California, Irvine Office of Human Research Protections and the Institutional Review Board (protocol ID 20216839). This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2137567. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

In December 2021, the UCI Community Credit research team hosted a public Zoom meeting for local nonprofits and community-based organizations to introduce the research project and the photovoice method. Attendees assisted in implementing snowball sampling recruitment of photovoice participants, who were then pre-screened based on eligibility criteria. Participants were eligible to complete an interview if they lived in Orange County or Los Angeles County, were older than 18, and had a combined household income of less than $100,000. Eligible participants then attended an orientation session in which the UCI team explained the project and the required technology, obtained informed consent for recording sessions and the use of photos, and answered participant questions.

Photovoice sessions were conducted over the Zoom platform in a combination of full group dialogues and small breakout groups. There were five sessions held over the course of five weeks in March and April 2022. Sessions 1–4 were two hours long. Session 5 (the public “share out” session) was one hour long. Sessions were conducted in English and Khmer (the primary language of three participants) using consecutive interpretation. In between sessions, participants uploaded photos they took to the VoiceThread platform, where they were also able to write captions and comment on other participants’ photos.

The photovoice sessions were run by four facilitators (three from UC Irvine and one photovoice practitioner from PhotovoiceWorldwide) with the assistance of two volunteer interpreters. There were eight participants. Although the project began with ten participants, two were determined to be ineligible due to discrepancies in their location data and non-participation, they were removed from the study after the second session. Participants who completed the photo-taking assignments and attended sessions were compensated for their time and efforts with three Amazon gift cards, disbursed after sessions 3–5.

The first two rounds of participant photo-taking were guided by questions derived from previous community listening sessions. They centered on perceptions of community resources, unmet needs, and trust. The third round of photo-taking was guided by questions that participants developed themselves in session three, focused on the themes of stability and sacrifice. Across the five sessions, participants learned about photovoice, how to take photos, and the ethics of photo-taking; discussed their photos and the experience of using photography to answer research questions; wrote titles and captions for photos; developed themes to categorize the photos; and presented their findings to partners and stakeholders. The participant-developed themes were sacrifice/creativity, support networks, balance, and uncertainty/resilience.

The data include transcripts from each of the five photovoice sessions. Within the transcripts, “plenary session” indicates full group conversations, whereas “breakout session” indicates a small group discussion in a Zoom breakout room. There are speaker tags for facilitators, participants, interpreters, and audience members (in Session 5); each speaker tag is accompanied by a time stamp. Because the sessions were consecutively interpreted in real-time, speech in Khmer is indicated in brackets (“[Khmer]”). The photos under discussion are briefly described in the transcripts in brackets. Where necessary, some brief cues related to gestures or screensharing are also provided in brackets. Direct identifiers and potentially identifiable information have been anonymized or removed.