Art-Based Research

What it is

The ordinary arrangement in research is that art is what gets studied. Art-based research inverts that. The making is the instrument, and the paintings, poems or performances that come out of it are treated as findings rather than as illustrations of findings arrived at some other way.

Credit for the term belongs to Elliot Eisner, who coined arts-based research in 1993 at a Stanford educational research institute. The plural form is his. McNiff's Art-Based Research, published in 1998 by Jessica Kingsley, established the version used in art therapy and uses the singular art. The two lines are close enough that they are frequently merged, and this vault records that McNiff draws on the methodology without crediting Eisner's coinage.

A worked example makes the shape clear. A researcher studying grief keeps a sequence of paintings across a year and reads the changes in them as data about how grief moves. That can illuminate the experience in a way an interview schedule cannot. It cannot tell you whether painting helps grieving people recover, because nothing in the design is set up to answer that question.

The live argument is about validity and generalisability. Critics hold that the method cannot adjudicate between competing claims: if two researchers produce two bodies of work that imply different things, there is no procedure inside the methodology for deciding which is right. Defenders answer that adjudication was never the point, and that some kinds of knowledge are lost when they are forced through a design built for adjudication. Neither side has conceded, and this page does not pick a winner.

In effect

The practical value of the method is in what it can surface. Experience that resists a questionnaire, process rather than outcome, the shape of something as it changes: these are what art-based research is good for, and there is no reason to be embarrassed about that.

The practical danger is the borrowing. Because art-based research carries the word research, work produced under it is routinely cited in arguments about whether the arts do people good. That is a category error and an expensive one, because the arts and health field already has an outcome literature and it is thin. A body of paintings about grief added to that pile does not strengthen it. It answers a different question.

The related move worth watching for is the practitioner treating their own practice as evidence. The maker is also the measure, which is the self-report problem in its purest form, and it is not solved by the fact that the self-report happens to be a painting.

What it does not say

It does not say that art heals. Nothing in the methodology is built to establish that, and using its output as though it were is the most common misuse.

It does not say that art-based research is not research. The debate here is about what counts as knowledge, and that is a real question with serious people on both sides, not a polite way of saying the method is worthless.

It does not say Eisner and McNiff are interchangeable. Eisner named it, in education. McNiff carried it into art therapy five years later. Where a source credits McNiff with the coinage, the source is wrong.

---