Opening to the multi-sensory nature of employee experience to discover new lines of inquiry.

Carter, Elizabeth and Limmer, Mark and Morris, Abigail (2026) Opening to the multi-sensory nature of employee experience to discover new lines of inquiry. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

Employee Arts Based Research (ABR) which in this instance refers to studies that use methods that require employee participants to undertake an “act of creation” (Prosser and Loxley, 2008,p.33) that includes drawing, painting or collage, is the focus of this study, as organisational research has predominantly used photography with employees, rather than participant generated creative methods (Ward and Shortt, 2020). Additionally, the types of employees that are included are professionals within the sectors of health, education and management, within which researchers have used ABR methods to enable employee emotional expression but how ABR methods support this has not been explored. Consequently, the aim of this research study is to explore and learn about the process through which employees can convey and express their emotions using ABR, to answer the research question of: “How does reflection through ABR methods support or hinder employee participants’ emotional expression?” To achieve this, a longitudinal, multi-modal qualitative design was used, within a generic qualitative methodology. Employees from a single Higher Education Institution (HEI) participated in two ABR group sessions, (separated by a minimum of five months) and a final 1:1 interview. Participants were requested to create visuals depicting their working experiences and share narrative meanings in a group setting, face to face and online. The visual and verbal data were thematically analysed to identify meaningful patterns across the data set. The analysis revealed three core themes: Gateway into My Experience, Seeking Emotional Balance, and Manoeuvring through Boundaries, detailing what supports and hinders employee emotional expression using ABR. The findings indicate that the repeated application of ABR can act as a visual emotional barometer, providing a dynamic measure of affective change over time, which can simultaneously create positive feelings in the participants. Additionally, this study makes a methodological contribution by analysing the relationship between visual and verbal ABR data through the thematic exploration of opposites. This analytical lens, prompted by the coding of emotional opposites and identifying opposites within the visuals, e.g. pictures of people walking uphill and sliding downhill, informed the emergence of the core theme, 'Seeking Emotional Balance,' and offers a pathway for future ABR researchers to bridge the analytical gap between visual and verbal data, and track the dynamic construction of employee emotional reality, over time.