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7 Ways For Teachers to become Researchers
A talk for the British Library Research Network Dr Francis Gilbert (Goldsmiths) with Debbie Bogard (British Library) Wednesday 3 December 2025 Online In early December (2025), I was delighted to co-lead an online professional development session for FE lecturers as part of the British Library’s Research Network. Working with Debbie Bogard, we introduced an accessible, imaginative,…
Creative Research Methods for LIS Research I.
Recently I have been reading “Creative Research Methods in the Social Sciences: A Practical Guide” by Helen Kara. It’s refreshing to read about the various approaches in arts-based research, research using technology, mixed-methods research and trans formative research. It made me think how these methods can be applied in LIS research.
One of the methods is vignettes, which I happened to co-write a paper about with two wonderful librarians, Allison Benedetti and John Jackson. Here’s an excerpt from our paper:
“Vignettes are short stories about hypothetical characters in hypothetical circumstances, to whose situation the interviewee is invited to respond. As a methodological tool, vignettes can be used in focus group interviews, in-depth interviews, or survey interviews, where the interviewee is invited to draw upon their own experience, and provide perceptions, opinions, beliefs, attitudes, and diagnostic predictions about how the fictional character in the vignette will behave. When observing or placing an individual in a particular context would not be possible for logistical or ethical reasons, vignettes are often considered. Approximating a real-world situation, vignettes allow for features of the context to be specified so that the interviewee can make normative statements about a set of social circumstances rather than provide their responses in a vacuum.
Vignettes are often presented as a written narrative that the interviewee can read. Vignettes must carry sufficient detail to allow the interviewee to visualize the hypothetical circumstances as an actual situation. Particularly, the situational elements of a vignette need to be carefully specified and the main characters in the vignette are usually given names. Following each vignette, the researcher may ask an open-ended question or a closed question with a set of response categories from which the interviewee can choose. Probes are used when necessary for the interviewee to elaborate on their responses.
In LIS research, vignettes have not been widely used. Given that vignettes are helpful to depersonalize sensitive topics and encourage respondents to talk more openly, they could be potentially useful for researching the attitudes and behaviors of scholars related to publishing, copyright, open access practices, and practically any area in which libraries are curious about the behaviors and habits of users. Vignettes could also be used with students to teach about or demonstrate concepts related to plagiarism and academic integrity. User experience and web design practices have long been utilizing personas or archetypes to evaluate designs and functionality of interfaces; there may be a place for vignettes to augment these practices, perhaps with remote or online usability studies.”
I would like to continue explore the use of creative methods in LIS research. Writing a blog series about this would help me document my exploration. So this post would be the first in this series. The next method I hope to explore is photovoice. A member of the 2016 IRDL cohort is considering using it. How great is that!
Getting creative - a review of Creative Research Methods in the Social Sciences
New post - getting creative with your methods, my thoughts on a new textbook from @drhelenkara
Creative research methods have a long tradition in the arts and humanities, but are much less familiar in the social sciences. So I’m delighted to see this new book from Dr Helen Kara offer a welcome insight into the growing field of creative research methods for social science research. The book is a positive romp through a whole range of creative methods and approaches. Inevitably this means…
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