Creative Research Methods 2e. Kara, Helen
Chapter summary
This chapter introduces the five key areas of creative research methods: arts-based research, embodied research, research using technology, multi-modal research and transformative research frameworks. It outlines good practice in creative research and gives a brief history of creativity in research. The chapter also introduces Indigenous research methods and outlines some ways in which they differ from Euro-Western methods. It reviews what is known about creativity and how creativity can operate in a research context. The chapter considers the distinction between informal and formal research, introduces evaluation research and takes a brief look at how researchers use creative methods in private.
The 21st century is a dynamic and exciting time for research methods. Methodological boundaries are expanding across disciplines. Even in the few years since the first edition of this book, the field has developed and proliferated as researchers seek effective ways to address increasingly complex questions. This applies across the social sciences, arts and humanities, as well as in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects. For example, pure mathematics, long considered a numerical discipline based on deductive reasoning, has begun to experiment with experiments (Sørensen 2016: 140) and employ creative writing (Harron 2016: 1).
This second edition reconceptualises creative research methods into five key areas:
1.arts-based research;
2.embodied research (new as a key area in this edition);
3.research using technology;
4.multi-modal research1 (formerly mixed-methods research); and
5.transformative research frameworks (such as participatory, feminist, community-based, queer and asset-based methodologies).
These areas are not mutually exclusive; in this book you will find examples of research that draws on two, three, four or even all five. And, in time, creative methods may develop that don’t fit into any of these areas. But, for now, this conceptualisation provides a useful way to think and talk about creative research. This will help you to give full consideration to the methods you might use to answer your research questions.
It is also important to note that creativity in research is not limited to methods of data gathering or dissemination. This book will demonstrate that creative methods are available for use at all stages of the research process. I am not arguing that they should replace the more conventional methods, but that the two can work in tandem, offering more resources to researchers.
This book does not claim to provide a definitive account of creative research methods. The field is growing and changing so fast that no text could capture its entirety. You will find many excellent examples in these pages, but many more were left out due to lack of space. Also, the examples offered are brief – in some cases simply a citation. A full-scale how-to book would be impossibly long, so this is a guide, including a lot of citations and examples for you to follow up methods of interest. The intention is to excite and inspire you, because ‘creative research methods … offer new ways of knowing’ (Weber 2018: 429). The book also has a companion website that you can visit for more inspiration and ideas. And perhaps what this book does achieve is to provide a snapshot of a particular point in research methods evolution: a point where multidisciplinary research teams are using creative methods to help them vault out of silos and leap over boundaries. This will be useful for readers who want to break free from disciplinary confines, or who need to do so because their research questions are too complex to be answered using the conventional methods and techniques of a single discipline.
One point that seems worth clarifying at the start is the relationship between ‘methods’ and ‘methodology’, particularly as the conceptualisation on the previous page includes both. These terms are often used synonymously, but they actually denote different aspects of research. Methodology is ‘a contextual framework’ (Grierson and Brearley 2009: 5) for research, that is, a coherent and logical scheme, based on views, beliefs and values, that guides the choices that researchers make. Within a methodological framework, methods are the tools that researchers use to gather and analyse data, write and present their findings. Methodology and method are intimately linked, both with each other and with research questions (Mason 2018: 32). Researchers need to understand all three, and how the relationships between them work, so as to help audiences understand how and why researchers make decisions in the course of designing and conducting research. And although some creative research methods may be appealing in themselves, it is essential to choose methods for their ability to address the research question within the methodological context (Ellingson 2009: 176).
There are also approaches to research that sit between method and methodology, such as ethnography and fieldwork. Ethnography originates from anthropology, and fieldwork from geography, although they have informed each other (Phillips and Johns 2012: 168; Pink 2015: 32) and both approaches are now used by many disciplines. They both privilege place and space as important aspects of research work, although in slightly different ways. In ethnography, place is ‘something that is not fixed and enclosed, that is constituted as much through the flows that link it to other locations, persons and things, as it is through what goes on “inside” it’ (Pink 2015: 33). In geography, the field may be ‘anywhere and everywhere, far and near, in material and virtual spaces, within places and also between them’ (Phillips and Johns 2012: 10). These kinds of approaches foster holistic methods including both place and person, such as place-based research (Booth 2015: 20; Pink 2015: 38; Thomson and Hall 2017: 30–1), mobile methods such as walking interviews (Jones et al 2008; Roy 2016: 210; O’Neill 2018) and apprenticeship as embodied method (Downey et al 2015: 183).
Like many books on research, this book is structured around different aspects of the research process: reading and thinking, gathering data, analysing data and so on. This could give the impression that these aspects can be separated from each other. In reality, that is not the case. For example, writing is an essential part of the whole research process (Rapley 2011: 286). Reading is also likely to occur throughout the process (Hart 2001: 7). Notes from your reading may be coded and analysed in the same way as data. Documents can be categorised as data or as background reading (Kara 2017: 146). Treating different aspects of the research process as separate makes them easier to consider and discuss, but, like the conceptualisation above, this is an artifice; they are inextricably linked. Some research methods are designed to try to acknowledge this complexity. For example, grounded theory, devised by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss in 1967, is a method for developing theory as data is gathered and analysed. Later scholars have built on this approach, such as by demonstrating that various types of diagrams can be co-constructed by researchers and participants as part of data gathering, data analysis, theory development and research presentation (Strauss and Corbin 1998: 153; Williams and Keady 2012: 218).
This book is written primarily for researchers working alone or in small teams, to help them give full consideration to the research methods they might use. In the Euro-Western world there are many more examples of qualitative than of quantitative research (Alasuutari 2009: 140), and the balance in this book reflects that. However, I am not trying to say that qualitative research is inherently creative, while quantitative research is uncreative. The formulation of an original hypothesis requires creativity (Saldaña 2015: 122). There is enormously creative work going on in quantitative methods and the physical sciences, such as in large-scale national surveys (for example, Burton 2013) and STEM research (for example, Walsh et al 2013: 20). Also, in social research, intangible subjects such as trust and intuition are being investigated through the creative use of quantitative methods (for example, Burns and Conchie 2012; Priem and Weibel 2012; Hodgkinson and Sadler-Smith 2014). Creative research methods are now being used in quantitative, qualitative and multi-modal research throughout all disciplines.
In this second edition I have worked to increase the number of examples from low- and middle-income countries and the global South. In the process I found out that there are some countries where creative research methods are not yet academically acceptable, such as Chile (Zapata-Sepúlveda 2016a: 469) and Brazil