Poetry as Qualitative Data for Exploring Social Development and Human Experience in Latin America

Expressive arts research has become a valuable means of exploring the lived experience of various social actors, their problems, and dilemmas. Poetry, in particular, has been shown to powerfully document the depth and richness of complex socio-psychological phenomena. This article explores the use of poetry in documenting social development realities in Latin America. It describes the history of poetry-as-qualitative research, and presents examples of both expressive and research poems