ABSTRACT
Employed across a range of contexts, the term ‘creative methods’ describes the use of techniques such as drawing, photography and poetry to explore participants’ lived experience of complex phenomena. Often, however, its use is limited to that of a mediating tool, designed to elicit more conventional talk or writing based responses, with the creative artefacts themselves disregarded. This chapter argues for the importance of considering the affordances of any research method (i.e. the manner in which how we research determines what we discover) and focuses on the use of drawing as a research method within audience research, focusing in particular on their impact through time and materiality. As proposed here, it is through these elements that creative methods can enable participants to communicate embodied or affective elements of their experiences. The radical potential of creative methods is the manner in which they begin to challenge some of the conventions of research methodologies, asking us to reconsider what is data, what is analysis and the possibilities of alternative presentation and experiential forms of knowing.
