Arts-Based Research

Kinds of Arts-Based Research Texts

Advocates and practitioners of arts-based research have provided two distinctly different sorts of textual products. The first kind is conceptual insofar as it addresses the nature, characteristics, and purposes of arts-based research. This kind of text is found in articles, books, book chapters, and conference presentations that focus on various dimensions of arts-based research. Of course, as with the formation of any novel approach to researching social phenomena, there is disagreement among scholars regarding these dimensions.

The second kind of text offers actual examples of arts-based research. These examples employ any of a number of art forms in the representation of the social phenomena under study. Various forms of the literary, visual, plastic, and performance arts have been represented, including the following: novel, novella, short story, poetry, found poetry, memoir, autoethnography, readers theater, ethnodrama, verbal portraiture, literary case study, literary essay, educational criticism, autobiography, biography, self-narrative, allegory, mixed genres, photography, film and video documentary and fiction, hypertext, painting, sculpture, museum installation, multimedia, dance, and music.

Purposes of Arts-Based Research

In their increasingly successful efforts to legitimate an approach to social research that is dramatically different from social science, arts-based researchers have identified unique purposes for engaging in their projects. Some scholars have emphasized the capacity of the arts for enabling viewers to perceive qualities within the social world that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. They have suggested, moreover, that different forms of art enable a percipient to see the same phenomena in different ways. This purpose for arts-based research, therefore, may be described as one of enhanced understanding through the communication of subjective realities or personal truths that can occur only through works of art. Elliot Eisner, an educationist scholar who coined the term arts-based research during the 1980s, has articulated this aim most forcefully. Eisner, a self-identified cognitive pluralist, [Page 30]advocated a kind of binocular vision that results from investigating educational (and other social) phenomena through both scientific and artistic lenses.

A second purpose identified with arts-based research also entails a shift away from the traditional objectivist epistemology identified with most social science research. Social scientists have tended to strive toward a high degree of certainty in securing and disclosing their findings. The publication of these findings sets forth knowledge claims about the phenomena under study. The higher the validity and reliability of those findings, the more likely they will be deemed useful in predicting, and even controlling, future events. However, arts-based research is not usually aimed toward securing (or even approaching) either “objective” or “subjective” truth. Indeed, most arts-based researchers harbor radically different aspirations for their inquiry projects. This purpose involves the generation of doubts about, the potential for disrupting or transgressing against, and the enhancement of uncertainty regarding presuppositions about the social world that have come to be taken for granted as contributing to a final reality.

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