A critical and interpretive synthesis of arts-based methods used by dance therapy researchers: A perspective from the creative arts therapies

Abstract

The creative arts therapies are a group of modality specific disciplines that include dance, music, drama and art. Creative arts therapists take an arts-based approach to practice which often results in the privileging of alternate ways of knowing, such as non-verbal, artistic, and embodied forms of expression and meaning-making. The rising interest in arts-based research in our field, as well as within psychology, has prompted us – a dance therapist and music therapist - to take a closer look at the research literature to ascertain the function and purpose of existing arts-based research approaches in the creative arts therapies. Using dance therapy as an example, we conducted a rigorous interpretive review of 12 dance therapy arts-based research articles to help answer the question - ‘what is the function and purpose of arts-based research in dance therapy?‘. As part of our review, we used an arts-based process to synthesise data and to strengthen our analytic process in a manner congruent with artistic ‘ways of knowing.’ Our exploration led us to recognise that arts-based processes appear to enable the ‘illustration’ and ‘illumination’ of novel understanding in ways that are often more difficult to arrive at when using other qualitative research methods. Furthermore, arts-based research can be useful for facilitating researcher reflexivity, which may be used in service of deepening the interpretive process in qualitative research. However, our involvement with the dance therapy publications also revealed a clear shortcoming for the field: at present there appears to be a clear lack of focus on direct client engagement in the arts-based research literature. As such, arts-based research in the field of dance therapy seems to be somewhat removed from professional practice and appears to instead fulfil a more scholarly or self-reflective purpose. Based on this discovery, we offer some recommendations for those interested in pursuing arts-based research within both psychology as well as creative arts therapies, and in doing so highlight the importance of client voice and experience in health-focused research.