Month: January 2024

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Creative Research Methods

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I am delighted to announce the publication of this book which I have edited. I am sorry it is very expensive – I hope Bloomsbury will produce a paperback in due course, and in the meantime, you should be able to get hold of a copy if you have access to an academic library.

The book has 22 chapters in nine sections with 2-4 chapters per section. The first section is an overview with chapters on creative research methods and ethics, creative research methods in the geo-political south, digital tools for creative data analysis, and human geography and creative methods. The other sections are on narrative inquiry, poetic analysis, visual methods, creating visual art, participatory textiles, embodied performative methods, participants as experts, and creative collaboration. I chose these divisions. The content of the book is so rich that there are many other ways I could have divided the chapters. For example, I could have had a section on digital methods, or one on multi-modal methods, or one on feminist research. I made the choices I did with two key aims: first, to make the book flow as well as possible from start to finish, and second, to highlight some of the key points that were coming through in the chapters. Of course this book is in no sense exhaustive, but it does provide some useful insight into the scope and range of creative methods in the 2020s.

The authors come from Australia, Canada, Belgium, India, Ireland, Nepal, the UK and the US, and include doctoral students, independent researchers, practice-based researchers and senior professors. Each chapter is excellent, important, and potentially useful for researchers. They all tell previously untold stories. Perhaps because of my interest in research ethics, Caroline Aldridge’s chapter seems particularly important to me. It highlights some of the barriers that can still face researchers wanting to use creative methods. Caroline is a former social worker and a bereaved mother whose son died as a result of mental illness. She wanted to investigate how other similarly bereaved parents experienced professional and organisational responses and investigations following their child’s death. Caroline worked with potential participants, via a private Facebook group, to co-create a research design which used participatory textiles. These would include a mixed-media quilt co-created with participants, plus researcher-created mixed-media visual vignettes. Both are tried and tested techniques. Caroline did this work carefully, respectfully, and ethically, using all her trauma-sensitive professional social work and insider researcher skills. Then her proposed approach, with all its supporting evidence, was rejected by her university’s research ethics committee. They wanted her to use more conventional methods where the researcher retains more power and the participants are simply providers of data. This left Caroline with a choice of doing her work ethically while disobeying the ethics committee, or obeying the ethics committee and, paradoxically, doing less ethical research. She made a third and very difficult choice and, with considerable sadness, suspended her doctoral research. Many researchers have faced similar dilemmas but they are rarely reflected in the literature. I am grateful to Caroline for agreeing to write a rather different chapter than she had originally proposed, because I think these stories need to be heard.

The overview chapters are important too. Su-ming Khoo, from the National University of Ireland, explores the relationships between creativity, art and science, with an unflinching look at the dark side of creativity, and demonstrates the place of creativity in ethical decision-making as well as research methods. Bibek Dahal and Suresh Gautam, from Nepal, show us where the differences and similarities lie in creative research methods in the geo-political North and South of the world. Christina Silver, Sarah L. Bulloch and Michelle Salmona, from the UK and Australia, outline the role of computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software packages in creative data analysis. Nadia von Benzon from the UK traces the development and use of creative research methods in geography, and considers some ways in which creative research methods transcend disciplinary boundaries. Taken together, these lenses – ethical, global, digital and disciplinary – tell us a lot about where the field of creative research methods is at present.

Overall the book gives us a good insight into a global field in which people are reviewing and developing methods, identifying new ethical difficulties and finding ways to overcome them, making good use of technology, and working across disciplines. It also shows that creative research methods are local, manual, and applicable within single disciplines. And it clearly demonstrates that creative methods are not only useful for gathering data but can also be useful at every point from research design to dissemination.

I would love to know which chapter (or chapters) of this book seems most important to you, and why. Perhaps you could tell me in a comment.

Why Bother With Creative Research Methods?

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Conventional research methods are good methods. Creative research methods, in themselves, are not better than conventional research methods. Sometimes all you need is to do some interviews and, if that’s the case, there’s not much point deciding to design an app and ask participants to use it to create multi-media data. But I have argued for many years that it is worth knowing about as many methods as you can, because that gives you a better chance of answering your research questions. Methods are tools, and the more tools we have in our toolboxes – within reason – the better equipped we are to do the work we need to do.

Several client meetings recently have gone like this:

Client: We need to use more research methods, not just surveys and interviews. Can you help?
Me: Yes indeed I can. I think methods X, Y and Z might suit you.
Client: But it will take us time to learn those methods and we don’t have any spare time.
Me: 🤦‍♀️

In these situations it is my job to find helpful arguments that will encourage my clients to find the time they need for the work they want to do. Here are four of the main arguments I use in this situation.

1. You will get better quality data.

Study after study after study, using creative methods, report that their authors are absolutely sure they have richer, more useful data than they would have been able to obtain using conventional methods. Of course there is a difficulty here that any researcher will recognise: no control group. Even so, the sheer number of times this appears in the literature, from sources independent of each other and with experience of using both conventional and creative methods, suggests that there is some truth in the assertion.

2. Funders and commissioners often appreciate a more creative approach these days.

A sensible and well thought through creative approach can help your work to stand out from the crowd. After all, there will be lots of other people who think they can’t find the time to learn about the creative methods that might help them to do their work more effectively. And this means that funders and commissioners will read lots of applications recommending surveys, interviews, and focus groups. If your application recommends collage, digital storytelling, and poetic analysis – OK there is no guarantee of success, but it should at least pique the readers’ interest and be more memorable than most.

3. After the initial set-up stage, some creative methods can save you time.

This applies particularly to creative methods that give participants a high level of control over creating data. These may be low tech, such as diaries, or high tech, such as apps. Getting participants to keep a diary is potentially a big win, with lots of data being generated with little or no researcher involvement. It’s a good idea to provide some structure, e.g. asking participants to answer three questions each week, or to record their reflections on a particular issue on one weekday and one weekend day – whatever works for your research project. And diaries may be written, or audio-recorded, or even drawn or stitched. Using apps in research can be expensive, especially if you need to commission a bespoke app, but can also have big potential advantages. For many participants, apps are user-friendly (though not for all, so you need to offer an analogue alternative too). And data generated using an app is immediately available to the researchers for analysis. So, for both of these methods and many others besides, there is a chunk of work to be done in setting up the method, but once that is done, they really can save you time in the long run.

4. Creative methods can be more ethical.

Please note I am definitely not saying creative methods are more ethical. But they can be, and where they are, this is an argument worth making. For example, some creative methods of gathering data can facilitate the involvement of participants in the initial phase of data analysis. Enhanced interviewing is one such method, where the interview can include questions about participants’ interpretations of the photos they have taken, or the artefact they have brought, or whatever is being used to enhance the interviews. Creative methods of presentation can be more engaging for audiences, and help them to understand more fully and remember better the messages you convey. There are plenty of other such examples of ways in which creative methods can support and augment researchers’ ethical work.

So those are the four main arguments I use. If you know of others, please share them in the comments.