eva Luating quaLity in artistiC researChpositivist understanding of what constitutes meaningful ‘scientific’ research, to a more
contemporary interpretative approach, was a long struggle. it is interesting in the light
of the present discussion about research methods in the arts, to read the accounts of this
struggle by guba (1990), lincoln (1995) and others, and also to see how the academic
context was also changing, resulting in the need for new theoretical understandings
and text books (denzin and lincoln 1994). guba and lincoln (1994), for example, saw
the emergence of qualitative methods as having a profound impact in all subject areas
leading to a ‘new paradigm’ based on a constructivist view of how data informs us about
the world. Rather than data ‘proving’ our (scientific) hypotheses, data acts to form our
interpretations of what is going on, and so certain types of data are meaningful to us
because we believe the world to be this way or that way, while other data does not seem
relevant to us. Thus we construct our view of the world based on certain fundamental
beliefs. This is a much more ‘subjective’ view of what the world is like which finds a role
for auto- ethnocentricity, and hence seems more relevant to the arts.
our ‘new paradigm’ approach falls into this category: a shift of perspective that
allows certain activities to become meaningful in the context of arts research, even
though those activities may not have been meaningful in either the context of academic
research per se or the context of professional arts practice per se.
We can express the problem based on aims and objectives. There seems to be an
agreement amongst the authors in this book that academic research has certain aims
and objectives, and professional arts practice has other, perhaps overlapping aims
and objectives. We could visualize this process of hybridization towards the creation
of an ‘arts research paradigm’ in a representation of two circles coming together and
overlapping (Figure 23.1). The problem is that we do not know the extent of this
overlap – there is a range of resulting models, from no overlap to complete overlap. at
one extreme (not adopted by any authors in this book but nonetheless identifiable in
the literature) we have the claim that there is no overlap at all, i.e. that the interests of
arts and academic research are distinct and separate. We could summarize this in the
Figure 23. Range of hybrid models that result from the merger of arts practice with academic
research, showing three different degrees of overlap.