What happened to creativity in social science research? It is my impression that research becomes more and more streamlined and that there is a shared understanding which epistemologies/methods/topics/theories/frameworks etc. are acceptable and which are not. If you do not follow the prevailing paradigm, your research will often be "filtered". What do you think?
That's a great question! I have wondered about the same things, coming at it from a humanities and cultural studies background, where approaches tend to be more eclectic. I have however been fortunate enough to collaborate with some very creative and theoretically/methodologically astute researchers from within the British psychosocial studies field on developing the Visual Matrix method (e.g. Article Psychosocial and Symbolic Dimensions of the Breast Explored ...
), which is highly original in many ways. My colleagues have also developed creative and relevant approaches to data collection and reflexivity, including walking interviews, free association narrative interviews, and scenic compositions. Check out the work of Wendy Hollway Lynn Froggett Julian Yves Manley and Alastair Roy
....and in terms of "filtering": yes, I think it is a problem, particularly when introducing a novel approach to e.g. a journal outside your core audience... In the case of the article I shared here, we were really pleased to have it accepted by a gender studies journal that may not be so familiar with psychosocial studies.
Birgitta Haga Gripsrud This is a great example of yours! In the 1930ies, Jahoda, Lazarsfeld and Zeisel conducted a classical sociological study about unemployment in Marienthal, Austria. They were very inventive and used, for example, walking speed as a measure for hopelessness. Most of their ideas would be rejected today (at least in the communities I know) for "lack of validity".
Hi Horst and Birgitta, I think there are plenty of other examples of creative approaches to research. I'm thinking of Maggie O'Neill's work on walking, ethnography and art; Les Back and Normal Puwar's lovely edited collection - Live Methods which is a treasure trove; Harry Ferguson's work in social work using go along methods; Rob Smith and Tom Hall's work on homeless support; and some of our work which operates between art and social science. However, I do hear from colleagues in some other countries - most recently from a Criminologist in Belgium - that in some places disciplinary boundaries are still very tightly drawn, and that in these places academics using different approaches suffer from a lack of support and recognition.
Hi Alastair, those are interesting examples. It seems to me that this might be a community issue. Some academic communities, as being represented by the leading journals in the field, might be more open to creative topics/methods than others.
What happened to creativity in social science research? I’d say that in some circles it became an imperative. Within the literature (especially journals) on broadly defined transdisciplinary field of qualitative research every other method seems to be either “creative” or “innovative”. There’s even a distinctive (at least nominally) category of methods, so-called “creative methods”.
Natalia Martini, this sounds interesting. But what happens when creativity becomes an imperative? Do these methods (with which I am not familiar) exactly specify which kind of creativity is allowed and which is not? I have once seen a moderator entering a room with a facilitator`s tool box and all the workshop participants urged her not to open it, since they were completely fed up with the "creativity methods" being used in consulting ;-)
Horst Treiblmaier, unfortunately sometimes this is exactly the case and I “blame” for that the pressure on innovation, but there are examples of approaches that engage researchers and research participants in a “truly” creative process. To those mentioned by Alastair Roy I’d add two general overviews: “Creative Research Methods in the Social Sciences” by Helen Kara and “Visual, Narrative and Creative Research Methods” by Dawn Mannay.
Natalia Martini, those seem to be very interesting books. It is quite inspiring to see that quite a few academics investigate alternative research methods.
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