The Basics • 83who complain as much as they applaud, told a clear and positive tale: “The results of a can-
did, in-depth survey of 4,000 subscribers—the largest survey ever to query people on mental
health care—provides convincing evidence that therapy can make an important difference.”
The survey also found that “the longer people stayed in therapy, the more they improved.” In
a professional periodical, Dr. Martin Seligman, consultant to the Consumer Reports st udy,
argued that the findings were comparable to those of conventional outcome research^1 (c f.
Hubble et al., 1999; Spiegel, 1999).
Quantitative Evidence
Demonstrating the effectiveness of art therapy through tightly constructed research
designs has not been easy to do. This problem has plagued all clinical outcome stud-
ies because of the huge number of critical, uncontrollable, and perhaps unquantifiable
variables involved in measuring change in human beings. It has been argued that well-
designed investigations, which would unequivocally demonstrate art therapy’s ability
to positively affect its recipients, are desperately needed, in order to get those in power
to pay its providers for their services. The few outcome studies available have shown
positive results, but most have also had undeniable weaknesses as in an early study
I did of the effectiveness of art therapy with some blind children to be described in
Chapter 6, “Assessment.”
Art Therapy Research
Art therapists interested in research continue to strive to evaluate their work as well as pos-
sible in this admittedly complicated area. Most early studies in art therapy were done by
people who worked in settings where a lot of research was going on (Kwiatkowska, 1978;
Rubin, 2005b; Wadeson, 1980). Some were done by those trained in other disciplines to con-
duct objective investigations (Betensky, 1995; Rhyne, 1995; Silver, 2005, 2007; Uhlin, 1972).
Useful background information is available in A Guide to Conducting Art Therapy Research
(Wadeson, 1992).
The next generation of art therapy researchers is even more sophisticated in their under-
standing of research methodology, and is likely to do a better job of assessing the effective-
ness of art therapy intervention. Studies so far tend to indicate art therapy’s success, but also
serve to remind us of the terrific complexity of measuring change. The Research Committee
of the American Art Therapy Association (AATA) has provided a resource in a 31-page
document, Art Therapy Outcome & Single Subject Studies (rev. 2007).
Art education and therapy researchers have been attracted to models of inquiry from
other disciplines as in Art-Based Research (McNiff, 1998; cf. also Beittel, 1973). In addition
to psychology and psychiatry, art therapists have been drawn to such diverse viewpoints as:
philosophy, aesthetics, art history, archeology, linguistics, hermeneutics, anthropology, eth-
nography, sociology, and ethology. Our British colleagues, equally uncertain about quanti-
fying the creative process, have published three collections of research (Gilroy & Lee, 1995;
Payne, 1994), the most recent taking into account the current demand on the part of funders
for “evidence-based practice” (Gilroy, 2006).
Research is most effective when it helps us to modify and improve what we do. From
studies of neurologically handicapped children, for example, I learned that drawing with
white chalk or crayon on black paper helps a child to work at a higher developmental level
than drawing the same thing with black on white (Uhlin, 1972). From another set of stud-
ies with normal children, a similarly useful finding: when the parts of a human figure are