Key Ideas

• Arts-based research is an approach to social research that employs premises, principles, and procedures that derive primarily from the arts (visual, literary, and performance based) rather than the social sciences.
• Arts-based researchers may either craft a research text that itself contains aesthetic or literary qualities or analyze the works of others (for example, students) in the manner of art critics.
• The primary purpose for engaging in arts-based research is to enable an audience to question commonplace educational or social phenomena, to perceive these from a different perspective, and to reflect deeply.
• Audience members make naturalistic generalizations by relating facets of the research text to analogous social phenomena with which they are already familiar.
• Many arts-based researchers engage in a multiphased qualitative problem-solving process in doing their research.
• Judgments about quality in arts-based research reflect the potential of the research study for achieving its heuristic aims through the plausibility and aesthetic power of the text.

Arts-based research is an approach that employs artistic design elements to study and reveal facets of social phenomena. These design elements may be associated with any form of art, including various literary, plastic, performance, musical, and digital arts, and allow the reader to expressively appreciate, perceive, and enjoy the research as a work of art. However, a few design elements may overlap with those found in the social sciences (such as ethnography, sociology, case study research, phenomenological research, and narrative research)—hence the term arts-based (rather than artistic) research. These design elements are employed in order to enable members of professional or lay communities to experience anew aspects of social and cultural phenomena. In doing so, arts-based researchers aim to raise fundamental questions about social issues, social practices, and qualities within cultural artifacts that have become taken for granted as obviously correct, useful, good, true, or beautiful.

For example, Coulter (2003) uses the genre of literary nonfiction to address the systemic processes that affect high school English language learners and works to communicate experiences from their perspectives and their stories. She uses the form of a novel to allow the reader to travel with these students and encounter the issues identified by the researcher through the design elements of theme, characterization, figurative language, and plot structure.