Planning and Conducting Arts-Based Research Studies
The term arts-based research signifies not so much a category of research as an approach in which a high degree of aesthetic design elements are employed effectively in order to fulfill the heuristic and interrogatory research purposes discussed earlier. The processes engaged in during the planning and conducting of these studies embody some common features. This is especially true for arts-based research in which the final work resembles a work of art, one that could be conventionally labeled as nonfiction or fiction. According to Barone (1992), several phases may be identified in the processes of planning and conducting these studies. They parallel the five phases identified in a process of art making that Ecker (1966) discusses as qualitative problem solving. To illustrate the anatomy of arts-based research we will refer to the making of the study by Barone (1983).
Titled “Things of Use and Things of Beauty,” this early piece of arts-based research took the form of a literary essay that also served as an evaluation report of a high school arts program commissioned by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. In it the reader can identify many of the design elements discussed earlier, such as choice of theme, characterization, figurative language, and plot structure. But the aim of the report was not, primarily, to serve the intrinsic purpose (Stake, 2005; see also Chapter Ten) of documenting or providing a final portrait of the program under study. Rather, the report raised questions about the relationship between the arts and utilitarian crafts and about the reasons for including arts in a school curriculum. The text included a portrait of the school program and an arts teacher designed to prompt conversations about the tension between a utilitarian (practical) versus a self-liberatory (self-expressive) rationale for arts education. (Note: The fact that this study involved an arts program is not what makes this an arts-based piece of research; it is, rather, the presence of artistic design elements that does so). This theme was not as present, however, in the author's initial research reflections that engaged the big picture.
Phase One: Random Qualities
In Ecker's first phase of qualitative problem solving (1966), the artist-researcher encounters the big picture of the phenomenon, which may seem abstract, hazy, and even random. In this phase the researcher may have decided on (or been assigned) a setting, site, or set of phenomena to be studied, but has no clear focus on what issues or themes are significant. If fieldwork is involved, then phase one may occur prior to or after becoming immersed in the research site. If the former, then this phase involves the researcher's conducting “preproduction” activities, just as many novelists, playwrights, actors, and nonfiction storytellers research their characters and the contexts of their lives. The artist-researcher might read archival and historical documents; talk with the actual people whose lives are being represented or with others who are similar to those people; observe people as they go about living their lives; study the physical surroundings and settings of the time and period being portrayed; and so on.
In this phase, however, the researcher is in the process of becoming familiar with the specifics of the phenomena to be studied, but has no clear means for discriminating between what is worthy of attention and what is not. Some arts-based researchers have a tendency during phase one to record everything, whereas others prefer to record nothing. For Barone, the first encounter with the arts program was the reception of a huge portfolio that the director of the program supplied to him by way of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Barone read it carefully but had no idea at that point as to what would ultimately serve as data within his study and what would not. He encountered the kind of anxiety that many beginning social researchers encounter in their search for a topic of social significance that deserves their attention.
Phase Two: Tentative Relationships Between Qualities
In phase two of the process, the researcher, having become immersed in the phenomena under study, sees certain patterns, or qualities, but only as structured fragments (Ecker, 1966). There is still no ultimate theme or central set of insights around which a portrait or story can be woven. Barone (1983), upon visiting the program itself for one week on location in North Carolina, noticed a clash between the official utilitarian (or crafts) orientation of the arts program and the more expressive, aesthetic undertakings of the program. This dichotomy in purpose became obvious as a result of data gathering from administrators of the program, in student focus groups, in observations of the arts classrooms, in studying the arts and crafts of the Appalachian people of the area, even in the personality of the director-designer-teacher in the program, Don Forrister. But these observations remained fragmentary, with Barone still unable to imagine how they might serve as a theme around which to construct a literary essay.
Phase Three: An Emerging Theme
On the evening of the third intense day of the site visit, a crystallizing moment occurred—one in which the pieces of a puzzle seemed to fall into place. After reading, reflecting, rereading, ignoring, staring, pondering, and daydreaming about the mass of phenomena he encountered, Barone arrived at a controlling insight: a tension between the roles of the arts and crafts in the lives of the teacher and students. Barone came to the realization that the story of the arts program was one that could be best understood in the sociohistorical context of the relationship between the arts and crafts produced by the Appalachian people, of whom both Forrister and his students were members. This seeming tension between the crafts (“things of use”) and the arts (“things of beauty”) was indeed resolved in observing and portraying the ways in which these people existed in their daily lives, in the activities in Forrister's arts class, and in the hopes and dreams of his students who refused to label themselves as either artists or craftspeople, the students who saw themselves as in fact living lives in which creativity and work coexisted—that is, lives of productive artistry.
Phase Four: A Developing Theme
In phase four the researcher uses qualitative control to compose the research text, and employs the theme as a guide for selection of those data to be included in the report and those to exclude. This control is based on the construction of a coherent “whole” with aesthetic power, rather than on data that are episodic, that is, vignettes lacking such coherence from an artistic point of view. For Barone, this process occurred both in the final days at the research site and after the visit. It enabled the researcher, while still in North Carolina, to seek out and include telling details that served as thematic questions through additional observations, interviews, and collection of archival data. Moreover, during the last two evenings of the visit, Barone began a draft of the literary essay. He completed the essay several weeks later, after writing several drafts.
Phase Five: Work That Is Judged Complete
In the last phase of the problem-solving process, as Ecker (1966) states, “the work is finally judged complete—the total achieved—the pervasive has adequately been the control” (p. 67). This judgment must be based on a sense not that the work appears as the final word about the thematic issues attended to but that the work will serve a metaphorical purpose, reminding readers that the central characters and events in the study could be viewed both as real and as virtual, as analogues of characters and events that exist outside of the text with which readers are already familiar. That is, the researcher aims toward generating discussions about the thematic content.