Creative Research Methods 2e. Kara, Helen
in its more academic form’ (Davidson 2012: 96). Artistic work seems to bring the ‘making’ into ‘making sense’.
Beyond artistic practice, there are other aspects of creativity that are relevant to research. Rapport (2004: 8–12) divides creative research methods into arts-based, narrative-based and redefined methods. For her, arts-based methods are primarily visual and performative; narrative-based methods focus on stories, often told verbally; and redefined methods take existing research methods and rearrange them into something new. For Mannay (2016a: 32), creative methods help to resist the familiar, the assumed and the taken-for-granted, and in so doing they open space for new understanding. Mason and Dale (2011: 22–3) view all creative research methods primarily as redefined, which fits with our understanding of creativity as bringing together existing elements in a new way. In recent years the move towards understanding and generating redefined research methods has gathered pace, such that we now have a growing body of literature covering creative methods. This includes creative methodologies, such as the transformative research frameworks already mentioned. It also includes some overarching methods, such as ‘netnography’, which is ethnography conducted in online environments (Kozinets 2010). And it includes creative methods for various parts of the research process, such as the use of diaries to corroborate, gather or construct data (Alaszewski 2006: 42–3), or the involvement of members of the public in publicly funded research, with the aim of improving its quality and relevance (Barber et al 2012: 217).
Research has been defined as ‘systematic enquiry whose goal is communicable knowledge’ (Archer 1995: 6). Despite all those long words, research is also a normal human activity. We gather, analyse and use data constantly as we live our lives in our bodies. Let’s say you go to make a hot drink one day and find the electric kettle isn’t working. That presents you with a problem to solve. You might check that the kettle is plugged in and switched on. If it is, and it still doesn’t work, that’s some data you’ve gathered and analysed to help you decide what your next step will be: checking the fuse box, perhaps. We also gather and analyse physical and emotional data. A dry sensation in the mouth and slight headache, once analysed, might lead you to drink some water. Your phone ringing might make you feel excited (if you are waiting for important news) or happy (if you fancy a chat) or irritable (if you are hungry and have just received some delicious food): you would analyse the combination of your physical and emotional sensations to help you decide whether to take the call.
Generally, we do this kind of informal ‘research’ without thinking of it as such – sometimes, without thinking at all. Yet it can be surprisingly creative. Conventional research doesn’t recognise the potential of informal research, focusing instead on other tasks such as reading, thinking and writing. But informal and formal research are not mutually exclusive, and using informal research creatively can benefit more formal research (Markham 2013a: 65–6). For example, formal research questions often develop from informal research (Madsen 2000: 42).
Evaluation research is a form of applied research that is widely used in many settings around the world. Most approaches to evaluation offer a high degree of flexibility about which methods to use and how to use them (Arvidson and Kara 2013: 13). This enables creativity in evaluation research. For example, Mertens (2010) conducted a transformative multi-modal evaluation using technology (Box 1.2).
Box 1.2: Transformative multi-modal evaluation research by Mertens
Donna Mertens, from Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, refers directly to her work as transformative, and describes this as ‘a framework of belief systems that directly engages members of culturally diverse groups with a focus on increased social justice’ (Mertens 2010: 470). Gallaudet is the only university in the world specifically for deaf students, and staff are required to be fluent in American Sign Language (ASL). The university had a teacher-preparation programme to prepare teachers for working with deaf students who had an emotional or physical disability. Mertens led a transformative evaluation of this programme. Her first step was to gather a research team that reflected the diversity of the community of teachers in deaf education: two were ‘culturally deaf’ (born deaf and grew up using ASL), a third was also deaf but grew up using her voice and lip-reading, and had a cochlear implant that enabled her to function in the hearing world. The fourth team member was Mertens herself, a hearing researcher, fluent in ASL and with over 25 years of experience working in the deaf community. The team produced a multi-modal design including an initial phase of participant observation, interviews and document reviews. Initial findings were used to develop an online survey to gather more quantitative and qualitative data. The survey findings were then used as a basis for more interviews. This proved to be an effective method for the evaluation, the findings of which led to the university dean making a commitment to changing the programme (Mertens 2010: 473).
While this book is primarily aimed at an academic audience, many of the methods outlined here could be used by evaluation researchers.
Most of this book is based on published material, accounts of creative approaches in research that form part of written research discourse. Although some of these accounts are in paywalled journals, or available only in English or only to people with access to the internet, they are still accessible to a large number of people. Much less accessible are researchers’ informal exploratory uses of creative methods.
When I am analysing data or writing research prose and feeling a bit stuck, I often begin writing a poem, or start on a digital diagram using NVivo’s modelling function. Some of these poems and diagrams get finished and the diagrams (although not the poems) are occasionally used in publications (for example, Kara 2018: 10). More often I get part way through a poem or diagram and realise that I’m no longer stuck and can carry on with my analysis or writing. This is a private part of my work, informal and exploratory. I do it alone; I don’t expect ever to write about it at greater length than this paragraph.
I am not the only one to make personal use of creative methods for my research. Brittany Amell is, at the time of writing, a doctoral candidate at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Amell uses drawing and collage in her own research process, but again, this is informal and exploratory, although she has also mentioned it in published work (Amell and Blouin-Hudon 2018: 38). She says that these methods help her to see more deeply into her projects and to make connections that she might not otherwise make (Amell, personal communication, 2018).
I am sure that many researchers worldwide draw on creative methods in support of their work. No doubt some of the examples in this book grew from just such informal exploratory practices. It would be interesting to investigate this in more detail.
The history of research methods is full of multi-skilled people working across disciplines. Yet, by the start of the 20th century the Euro-Western world had reached a point where most researchers did research in only one area and were not expected to know about anything else. White, male positivists were in control, reasoning that research was a neutral activity, conducted in laboratories (and thereby somehow separate from society), and that researchers had no effect on the research process or its outcome. This approach to research has been called ‘disembodied’ (Ellingson 2017: 6; Thanem and Knights 2019: 10).
In the second half of the 20th century the fallacies in positivist reasoning became apparent. Researchers began to view their work as value laden, symbiotically linked with society and inevitably affected by the researchers themselves. As they developed this new paradigm researchers began to reach out beyond the bounds of conventional