creative methods in qualitative research

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Using Creative Methods in Qualitative Interviews

By: Jon Rainford
Product: Sage Research Methods Cases Part 1
Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
Publication year: 2021
Online pub date: January 11, 2021
Discipline: Education
Methods: Creative research , Qualitative interviewing , Artistic inquiry
DOI: https:// doi. org/10.4135/9781529758115
Keywords: aspirations , fear , higher education , Lego , students Show all Show less
Online ISBN: 9781529758115 Copyright: © SAGE Publications Ltd 2021 More information Less information

Qualitative interviews can be enhanced through using creative methods within them to prompt discussion and conversation. The research project upon which this case focuses sought to explore the space between policy and practice in pre-entry widening participation work in universities. This is an area where often people focus on telling you about what they should be doing in line with institutional missions as opposed to the messy realities of practice which was what I was particularly interested in exploring. To do this, I opted to use creative methods to encourage participants to think about key issues in different ways and to provide an opportunity to discuss issues beyond a traditional question and answer approach which can encourage reliance on repetition of existing discourses on certain topics. This case explores how two contrasting methods: A drawing task and a LEGO construction task were used within the same interview. It will reflect on their relative success and the barriers to their effective use within the interview setting. Drawing on the idea of creative confidence, I will highlight how the failures during my own research project may help future researchers think about planning for overcoming these barriers early in the research process.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this case, students should be able to

Understand the benefits using creative methods can bring to qualitative interviews
Identify an appropriate creative method which could be selected for their own research project
Evaluate the potential barriers their chosen creative methods may present to participants
Develop a strategy for overcoming potential barriers when planning their data collection

Project Overview and Context

The overall research study ( Rainford, 2019 ) was focused on exploring how practice and policy align within pre-entry widening participation (WP) outreach work in universities. In England, universities charging tuition fees over a basic amount (£6,000 per year in 2016–2017) were required to submit plans called access agreements to a regulator (the Office for Fair Access) detailing their plans for supporting individuals from backgrounds under-represented in higher education. This work was informed by national policy ( HEFCE and OFFA, 2014 ) but implemented locally. Therefore, the shift from national to institutional policy and then in enacting institutional policy in practice allows many spaces interpretation. It was this shift and interpretation I was interested in exploring, what Ahmed (2007) calls the “gap between words and deeds” (p. 590).

When this topic has been researched previously, the focus has been primarily on policymakers and senior managers (e.g., Harrison et al., 2015 ; Jones, 2017 ) or policy analysis ( McCaig, 2015 ; McCaig & Lightfoot, 2019 ). Only one previous study examined practitioners who enact this policy (Wilkins & Burke, 2013). This previous study was limited in scope to one practitioner in each of seven different institutions. I was interested in exploring how multiple individuals in the same institution made sense of policy and to uncover the complexity and messiness of policy enactment. Policy at all levels often relies on keywords and phrases with taken for granted definitions. In the case of this study, two key terms recurred in policy: “raising aspirations” and “widening participation student.” I wanted to try and unpick the way individual practitioners understood and applied these in their everyday practices. When questioned about taken for granted terms, institutional party lines or recited policy positions can be common responses. Therefore, the methods chosen needed to find a way to go beyond this rhetoric. For this reason, when reading work by Dawn Mannay (2010) that highlighted the role creative methods can play in making the familiar strange, this planted the seeds that the use of creative methods may help realize the project’s ambitions.

Section Summary

This case study is based on the second phase of a research project examining the gaps between policy and practice in pre-entry work to widen participation to higher education.
A key concern of the study was to unpick the taken for granted uses of key policy terms and therefore an approach was needed that helped to defamiliarize and help participants to deconstruct their understandings of these ideas.

Research Design

This case study focuses on Phase 2 of the research project which involved interviews with 16 practitioners in seven different universities. Within the interviews there were four key areas that I wished to explore. First, I wanted to understand the background of the participants, how had they come to work in this area and what made them choose to undertake this type of work. Following this, I wanted to delve deeper into the two issues that had emerged from the Phase 1 analysis: who they as individuals saw as “typical” WP students they worked with and a term that kept recurring, “raising aspirations.” Finally, I wanted to develop a better understanding of each individual’s role to look for commonalities and differences in what these practitioners do on a daily basis. The first and the last elements were well suited to traditional semi-structured questioning approaches but the way in which individuals are conceptualized as “typical” WP students through policy framings and the unquestioned use of the term “raising aspirations,” I felt that something more was needed. I wanted to do was uncover the messiness and complexity behind them. For example, one target WP demographic are Black and minority ethnic students (BAME), yet this term leads a lot of scope for local interpretation as there are numerous local communities that fall under this banner, some who are not actually under-represented in higher education. Similarly, identification of under-representation using geographical measures does not tell us much about how that targeting process is locally realized and who within those areas actually benefits from this work.

This is why, in developing the interview schedule, I felt that creative methods would be beneficial as a way to explore some of this complexity as opposed to eliciting responses echoing policy rhetoric. A number of different creative methods were considered. While those chosen were the most appropriate for this project, it is not that they are better methods, just that they were more suited to the issues being explored in this study. There were a number of key considerations that informed this. Helen Kara (2015) outlines a detailed range of methods used in for creative research. Some common methods used within interviews include drawing ( Literat, 2013 ), photography ( Vigurs & Kara, 2017 ), and found objects ( Brown, 2019 ). While photography is often used as a visual method ( Harper, 2012 ), who selects the photos becomes an issue. If participants provide them, there are ethical issues and if the researcher provides them this can narrow the choices based on the materials provided. There is also the possibility for likenesses to specific individuals that the participants know triggering subconscious associations with these individuals.

It is also important to acknowledge that in designing the research, I was very much informed by Gauntlett and Holzwarth (2006) notion of creative methods being a way to discuss issues that are being analyzed and these discussions being the focus of the analysis as opposed to the creative outputs themselves being the locus of analysis. With this in mind, the ability for the participants to complete the tasks within the interview setting was important as I wanted to be able to share in their production so we could talk about and around the issues they were grappling with. This led to the development of two distinct tasks: one to explore the framing of “typical” WP students and one to explore aspirations.

Drawing Typical Students

One task which is often conducted with young people in WP work is to get them to draw “typical” students to dispel myths about higher education. This inspired the idea of practitioners drawing a “typical” student to explore in depth what their local interpretations of a typical WP student. In choosing to use drawing with adults, something that needed to be considered was how well this might work. The literature on the use of drawing-based methods with adults is limited, often because it has not been as successfully used as with children. However, for this reason, a worksheet was developed to support those who might be less confident in drawing ( Figure 1 ).

The image has a human silhouette in the center and six message bubbles around the silhouette. Text in the bubbles is listed below:

Who is your student and where are they from?
Tell me about what makes them a widening participation student
What might they do after graduation?
What sort of things will they do outside the classroom?
What will they study at University?
What are they studying now and where?

Figure 1. Typical student worksheet.

An image shows a student worksheet used in a research project having several questions about a student.

The use of worksheets or templates in visual research can make creative methods more accessible by scaffolding the task. This has been done in other research projects effectively ( Wall, 2008 ). Drawing people can often be a challenge, so I decided it would be useful to provide an outline for participants to draw within. I knew from doing similar tasks with young people, knowing what sort of things to consider in their constructions of a typical student was important and thus I added a range of prompt questions to help the participants consider these.

Building a Sense of Aspiration

To try and unpick the work being done by the term “raising aspirations,” I felt it was important to try and get sense of how each individual conceptualized aspirations and the relationships between different types of careers. The premise of “raising aspirations” is essentially to get young people to aim for “better” jobs. To understand what is coded within this, an exploration of how individuals understand how they decided what made jobs “better” or “worse” was a useful basis for these discussions with a question about what “raising aspirations” means to them following after the completion of the task. An often-used metaphor when discussing aspirations and social mobility is that of a ladder. This can, however, be quite a contentious metaphor with many people rejecting hierarchical framings of the issue. However, it was for this reason that a ladder was chosen for this task. With creative task, there is always the options for participants to interpret or participate in a way unexpected to the researcher and just because the ladder was there did not mean the participant had to put the jobs on that ladder, or to use every step. I hoped that, as happened in more than one interview, even if the participant rejected this notion of ranking jobs, that the task would provide a springboard for a discussion of issues surrounding aspiration.

It was important though was that a whole range of jobs were represented in the task ( Figure 2 ). The jobs represented needed to include typical manual occupations, traditional professions, some newer emerging job roles and some which are undervalued in society. The task needed to be manageable for the interview context and so a shortlist of 10 jobs was made which finally included the following:

Self-employed decorator;
Computer games designer;
Primary school teacher;
Investment banker;
Footballer;

Figure 2. LEGO ladder and representations of 10 jobs.

An image shows ten LEGO figures attached to a LEGO base plate forming an inverted “V” shape such that five LEGO figures are on the left and five are on the right. The LEGO figures are dressed based on ten different professions.

It was also important to consider representation which primarily took the form of gender representation. I was very careful to try to disrupt traditional gender stereotypes by making roles traditionally coded as male such as the doctor and the scientist explicitly coded as female. One area of representation that was also consciously considered in the use of LEGO was that of race. Using the traditional yellow of LEGO figures which they describe as neutral ( LEGO, 2018 ) was a conscious choice. However, in hindsight, the consideration of ethnic representation needed more consideration. The notion of yellow LEGO as neutral has been questioned by many scholars ( Cook, 2017 ; Johnson, 2014 ) and in using this method again I would have employed a wider range of colors of LEGO within the figures.

As with any newly developed interview schedule, I piloted this with two practitioners working within the field I was researching. Working within the field myself, this was easily achieved by piloting with colleagues. The pilots confirmed that both tasks offered interesting points to talk about and saw both participants adopting different approaches. In hindsight, however, the use of colleagues who worked in a similar environment meant that the possible barriers to engagement with the typical student task did not come to the fore within the pilot. It is therefore potentially more useful to pilot the creative task on people who might normally be more resistant to unusual requests in an interview to ensure that they are accessible to all of your participants.

The focus of the creative activities was to generate conversation about and around the choices being made and the issues visualized, and therefore it was important that this took place within the interview itself.
Two different creative methods were used which were planned to be accessible to a range of participants. As drawing is often underutilized in research with adults, a scaffolded worksheet was provided to support those who might not be as keen to draw.

Method in Action

Both methods resulted in in-depth conversations which generated data about the key issues being investigated. The way each was approached however was in stark contrast. The LEGO task created lots of excitement among the participants. This carried on beyond the interview context with some participants reporting that they had repeated the task within their own teams to talk about these issues. The emotional connection to the LEGO was also useful when trying to engage external audiences with the research especially on social media and at subsequent conferences. Within the LEGO task, the ways in which participants approached it offered insights into how definitive, or not their thoughts on these issues were in a way a traditional question–answer approach would not have done. In contrast, the creative engagement with the typical student task was limited. Despite having a range of drawing material provided, all the participants chose to use a biro and either wrote answers to the questions on the sheet or answered them verbally. Outside of the pilots, no participants chose to draw on the outline of the person. At first glance, this may seem like a failure of method as it did not elicit drawing but it did still generate conversation around the messiness of targeting WP work, which was the goal of the task.

This led to a differential uptake of the two creative methods in the same interview. The drawing task, which was not really engaged with by any of the participants in a creative way and a LEGO task which saw every participant engage with it. This differential engagement also led me to follow up the interviews with a post-interview questionnaire to try and understand participants’ perceptions of the tasks. I have reflected on this in much more depth elsewhere ( Rainford, 2020 ) but the four main reasons can be aligned to the idea of creative confidence.

Creative Confidence and Its Role in Creative Methods in Interviews

Creative confidence as a concept is essentially the preconditions to enable people to engage in creative tasks. Kelley and Kelley (2012) have argued that everyone can be creative but that there are four barriers to being able to use this creativity; fear of judgment, fear of failure, fear of the first step, and fear of the unknown. Within the reactions of the participants to the tasks and a follow-up questionnaire I conducted, it was clear that for some, drawing was something they felt they were not good at and was not something they anticipated doing in an interview setting. Likewise, when one participant broke the LEGO ladder, they felt like they had failed the task despite reassurances that it was ok. Therefore, considering the methods through these four barriers was a useful way to reflect on why the drawing may not have been successful in this study.

The two methods both enabled useful data to be generated; however, the creative engagement with the drawing task was much more limited than the engagement with the LEGO task.
Kelley and Kelley’s (2012) four barriers to creative confidence are a useful way of thinking about why participants did not engage with the drawing task, namely fear of failure, fear of judgement, fear of the first step, and fear of the unknown.

Practical Lessons Learned

From the differential engagement with the two tasks, it was clear that the drawing presented too much of a barrier to the participants to engage with it. In hindsight, there are a number of modifications that might have been made to increase its effectiveness. Continuing to explore this through the four barriers, fear of failure was clearly a concern for some participants. While it was not vocalized during the drawing, it was during the LEGO task where two participants were explicitly concerned when their ladders broke. Placing more emphasis on the purpose of the tasks as a way to talking about issues and building rapport specifically around creativity may have reduced some of this fear of failure. It would also have gone some way to address the second barrier, the fear of judgment.

The drawing task was early on in the interview yet was the more creatively demanding task. By altering the structure of the interview and starting with the LEGO, a more accessible task, this could have acted as a gentler transition toward drawing. Alternatively, providing some low stakes warm up activities might have been useful to help develop a sense of mastery and to reassure participants that the tasks were not a judgment of their drawing skills.

It is also worth reflecting on how the scaffolded worksheet may have increased the fear of the first step. By adding the framing questions and offering a wide range of materials to work with, this may have offered too many choices to the participants. In doing so, this could have pushed them toward the more familiar notion of writing answers to questions. In similar projects, it might be worth piloting less scaffolded methods as well to explore what would be more suitable for the target participants.

Finally, the fear of the unknown might have been better addressed by setting the scene before the interviews and within the project information sheets. One participant when asked about why she did not draw on the typical student task mentioned how she “did not think to draw” and felt there was not time in the interviews to do this. This was in spite of being encouraged to draw during the interview itself. It is therefore important to think about how participants might be better prepared for this prospect when creative methods are being employed.

Using the four barriers to creative confidence allowed me to reflect on how this might be mitigated in order to make the use of drawing tasks more accessible. To do so, using the structure and the tasks themselves to build rapport in the context of creativity could reduce the fear of judgement and failure in particular.
While scaffolding a task and offering a choice of options can make it more accessible, too many options might increase the fear of the first step so a balance is needed.

The use of creative methods within this study enabled issues to be researched in a way that a traditional question–answer dialogue might not have. They enabled conversations to happen around the choices made and the understanding of issues behind those choices. Through making participants consider everyday things in new ways they enabled them to consider not only the choices they made but why they were making them. The LEGO task, in particular, highlighted the certainty with which these choices were being made through observation of the actions of the participant.

The use of drawing had limited success within the study but that does not mean drawing with adults should not be considered. In this context, there are a number of possible reasons which I considered through the four elements of creative confidence: fear of judgment, fear of the first step, fear of the unknown, and fear of failure. These considerations therefore need to be taken into account when planning creative tasks. While the worksheet aimed to address the fear of the first step, it might have actually been overwhelming with too many choices. Rapport, however, is very important in attempting to mitigate these. Furthermore, another way that might have yielded better engagement with the drawing might have been to start with the less complex LEGO task and follow on with the drawing task. This would have allowed for the building of creative confidence within the confines of the interview and if you are planning to use drawing, starting with less creatively complex tasks or warm up exercises that are lower stakes might be a useful consideration.

The fact that drawing was of limited success did not, however, impact the data collected and its analysis. Through planning to focus on the discussions and conversations as opposed to the artifacts themselves, the lack of drawing was not an impediment. It is worth considering this as it means if a creative task does not take the form you expected, that there is still rich data to inform your analysis.

Creative methods allow participants to consider everyday issues in different ways and allow the researcher to engage in conversations around topics in ways question–answer approaches might miss.
The four elements of creative confidence can provide a useful way to considering the potential limitations of a creative methods like drawing and enable the researcher to plan in ways that support participants to develop this confidence in the interview setting.

Classroom Discussion Questions

1. Drawing an underutilized method in research with adults. Does this case study convince you it is still worth attempting?
2. This case study highlights four barriers in relation to creative methods. Do you think there are any other barriers beyond these?
3. What else might have impacted the participants lack of engagement with drawing?
4. How else could this study have scaffolded the drawing task?