Surveys: PRVoices researcher / practitioner and institutional support teams surveys – overview

Background

The first and main point of data collection for the project was two surveys, carried out between 21 March and 25 April 2022.

You can find out more information about the project and the surveys (including links to the questions) on this Practice Research Voices Survey blog post.

We ran two concurrent surveys – one aimed at researchers and practitioners and one aimed at institutional support teams. We used the survey as an opportunity to identify people who would be interested in participating in other activities throughout the project.

Highlights from the data

Researcher and practitioner survey – 59 responses

Institutional support teams survey – 23 responses

Respondents came from a range of practice research disciplines although primarily the responses came from art and design and music, drama, dance and performing arts.

Barriers to capturing practice research highlighted included:

Culture

“Academia continues to institute a hierarchy of knowledge through research norms which disadvantages researchers who use art as their medium. The same prejudice limits the quality of what universities support and produce through its own research sectors.”
Researcher / practitioner survey response

“Almost all of the difficulties in doing these three things are not to do with the system at all, but rather with the culture of practice based research, and especially the looseness of the connection between an artist’s practice and what they see as the admin responsibilities of their part-time teaching job.”
Institutional support teams survey response

Infrastructure / technology

“Lack of technical expertise and resources (e.g. time) to adequately preserve the work and upgrade to more recent digital formats so as to make it accessible for research and creative purposes. Lack of visibility (a public-facing platform where someone could search for the work).”
Researcher / practitioner survey response

A dedicated space fo documenting this that is intuitive to practice. Something that respects all parts of the process. Something flexible to different process that are not always linear.
Researcher / practitioner survey response

Expertise / skills

“Lack of digital skills and knowledge.”
Researcher / practitioner survey response

Complexity / time

“The end product (output) does not reflect the journey of the research. Its hard to document the process and then share all the stages involved. My practice often takes over a year to complete, thus it is a longitudinal process to document.”
Researcher / practitioner survey response

“A big barrier is time and preparation – ensuring that planning has happened prior to the research taking place and that sufficient thought has been put into meaningfully capturing the research”
Institutional support teams survey response

Preservation

“Preserving the process of data generation.”
Researcher / practitioner survey response

A research data mapping exercise was carried out and highlighted a number of socio-cultural and technical barriers to sharing and re-use of practice research data. See this PRVoices at the 17th International Digital Curation Conference blog post for an overview by project team member Dr Holly Ranger.

We plan to share insights from the qualitative data we captured in the coming weeks.

PRVoices-survey-results-overview Download