Trusting Arts-Based Studies

Works of arts-based research are not to be trusted in two ways. First, a work of art may not be phenomenologically truthful in that it does not reflect exact, accurate experiences that can provide insight with certainty for the reader about a phenomenon. If readers expect texts of arts-based research to be literally true, they miss the point of arts-based research discussed earlier. Instead, the reader may expect a believable version of events, a plausibility, a kind of verisimilitude, but not a final “truth” in regard to “how things truly are” from a privileged perspective. Every work of arts-based research is a potential prevarication (Grumet, 1988). In this way the work serves as a framework for experiences that the reader is reminded of, and asked to connect with, through the work's expressive qualities.

Second, even if a piece of arts-based research is a well-crafted work of art, an issue of trustworthiness remains (Barone, 1995). A work of arts-based research may not succeed in fulfilling its heuristic purpose. In that regard it may remain superficial or fail to sufficiently interrogate prevailing worldviews. For that reason every reader or viewer must adopt a postmodern sense of skepticism toward a work. This means that trust must be earned by a work of arts-based research in every engagement between the text and the skeptical viewer.

Nevertheless, if a work succeeds in the ultimate purposes of arts-based research (raising questions, providing opportunities to reexperience phenomena, and questioning assumptions about those phenomena), then the result may be an emancipatory moment for readers or viewers. This moment is a heightened awareness through which the reader begins to actively construct new meanings and perceptions about a social phenomenon, calling previous ways of perceiving the world into question (Barone, 1995).