Welcome back to my blog, where I talk about being an illustration researcher. Where is the boundary within research?

This topic is something that I’m stumped with; not that I don’t know it – I do – but it’s something that I have trouble putting into words. It’s a murky area that I think relies on a case-by-case definition rather than having an overarching rule. It’s about rigour in arts-based research.

Let’s start from the ground up. In simple terms, rigour simply asks how thoroughly rule-binding something was. If a research project has been through a rigorous literature review, I imagine that the researchers looked at thousands of articles in the literature before making a review. The rigour in this instance lies in how deeply the researchers searched for the topic (remember our conversation about the wide and deep search in the previous post?). Have they gone through all the journals? Have they covered as many years of this discussion as possible? Have they searched through articles in different languages? And so on. In fact, this is not uncommon in *traditional* forms of research – I’ve seen a review article that collated around 2,000 papers (I am sure it was more, but I can’t remember the exact number). I thought, they’ve really gone through EVERYTHING!

But then, how is rigour translated into something like practice-based illustration research where openness, adaptation and rule-bending are written into its enquiry?

To answer this thoroughly, I’ve had a quick read through some papers. This paper by Biggs provided a much-needed clarification in my head. Ah, it feels so good to encounter existing thinkers who have mulled over a topic way before I ever wondered about them. According to Biggs, much of which I agree and empathise with, rigour in any kind of research comes down to the innovation, replicability and effectiveness in answering the research question. In other words, rigour helps a research project to evidence whether:

1. The research project is new; how does one know that no one has actually done this before?
2. The research is something that other people follow.
3. The research question has been answered; if so, how?

Bigg says, and as I said as well, research is research, regardless of whether it is practice-based. However, there is one distinction between rigour in traditional academic format and in creative research. It is where the emphasis on replicability lies. Whereas in traditional research, the result of the study needs to be replicable, in creative research, it is more important to validate the method.

It is a given assumption that the result of a method will differ in creative research; two illustrators may be given the same brief, but the outcome will be wildly different. Then, it is important to highlight what path has been tread, what method was used innovatively and how it adds to the pool of knowledge in this particular field. Here, the most important question that follows a research study is: “How do you know?”

I often think of traditional research as baking biscuits and creative research as baking bread. I have been told that when making sweets, following the steps, reaching the right temperatures and baking for the requested minutes will produce a result that replicates the original product. With bread, however, the optimal mix of ingredients is shared, but the resulting product can differ so wildly – for better or for worse. (Apologies if this metaphor scratches any baker’s nerves!)

Perhaps rigour is not something to worry about in the research proposal stage. But it’s an important angle in PhD research, and it was great for me to untangle a piece of knowledge that I never unpacked during my thesis!