Abstract
Drawing on several studies we take up question about fictionalization in this article. In particular, we are interested in the intentions and purposes of fictionalization and discus these within the context of narrative inquiry. We draw attention to how fictionalizing has become a common and often unquestioned part of responding to concerns about anonymity raised by research ethics boards. We see three purposes for fictionalization: (a) protection of the identities of participants, (b) creation of distance between ourselves and our experiences, and (c) a way to engage in imagination that enriches inquiry spaces and research understandings.
Introduction
In the midst of listening to a conference presentation, Jean and Vera glance at each other as the speaker references Shaun’s (Murphy, 2004) work on fictionalization. The speaker is drawing attention to the importance of fictionalizing as a way to anonymize and protect the identities of research participants. Jean and Vera wonder whether that is all Shaun is underlining in his use of fictionalization. Later in a conversation with Shaun, Andrew, Janice, and Pam, Vera and Jean pick up on their wonder and raise the following questions: What do we mean by fictionalizing in narrative inquiry? What purposes does fictionalizing serve? Is it only about protecting participants? and What else is at work?
These questions are the focus of this article. We draw on what we have come to understand about the purposes of fictionalizing in narrative inquiry over many years and within many studies (Clandinin et al., 2006; Clandinin, Schaefer, & Downey, 2014; Huber, Murphy, & Clandinin, 2011). We draw attention to how fictionalizing has become a common and often unquestioned part of responding to concerns about anonymity raised by research ethics boards, but we also move beyond those concerns to other intentions and purposes of fictionalizing in narrative inquiry. We see three purposes for fictionalization: (a) protection of the identities of participants, (b) creation of distance between ourselves and our experiences, and (c) a way to engage in imagination that enriches inquiry spaces and research understandings. We turn first to a brief explication of narrative inquiry, the methodological context for our work.
What Is Narrative Inquiry?
Over many years, we developed the following definition of narrative inquiry, one that allows us to attend to experience when we understand experience as a storied phenomenon.
Narrative inquiry is a way of understanding experience. It is a collaboration between researcher and participants over time, in a place or series of places, and in social interaction with milieus. An inquirer enters this matrix in the midst and progresses in the same spirit, concluding the inquiry still in the midst of living and telling, reliving and retelling, the stories of the experiences that make up people’s lives, both individual and social. (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 20)
The most important defining feature of narrative inquiry is that it is the study of experience as it is lived and told. Dewey’s conception of experience underlies our understandings of narrative inquiry, whereby experience is understood as “a changing stream that is characterized by continuous interaction of human thought with our personal, social, and material environment” (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007, p. 39). This conception of experience shapes the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space with its dimension of temporality (past, present, future), sociality (with attention to the personal and unfolding existential events), and place (the topological geographic places where events including inquiry events take place) (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). As a consequence of this Deweyan-inspired view of experience, the ontology of narrative inquiry is transactional (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007).
The epistemological implications of this view imply that the regulative ideal for inquiry is not to generate an exclusively faithful representation of a reality independent of the knower. Instead the regulative ideal for inquiry is to generate a new relation between a human being and her environment—her life, community, world—one that “makes possible a new way of dealing with them, and thus eventually creates a new kind of experienced object, not more real than those which preceded but more significant, and less overwhelming and oppressive” (Dewey, 1981, p. 175). In this pragmatic view of knowledge, our representations arise from experience and must return to that experience for their validation. (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007, p. 39)
Within this epistemological view of experience, we see narrative inquiry as firmly situated within the relational. We also understand that in narrative inquiry, our intention is not to generate an exclusively faithful representation of a reality that is independent of knowers, but to generate a new relationship between researcher and participant. However, given that our representations arise from experience, we must seek validation with the experiences of participant and researcher. Working within this set of assumptions, our considerations of fictionalization become important, particularly as we attend to questions of validation within the experiences of researchers and participants.
Purposes of Fictionalization
In narrative inquiry, our considerations of fictionalization are always set within the relational co-composing of inquiry fields, field texts, and interim research texts and the composing of final research texts (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). It is perhaps tempting to think that fictionalizing, whatever its form, contradicts the objectives of good research, the purpose of which one could understand is to faithfully represent phenomena and/or experience. As we make clear in our understandings of narrative inquiry, this is not part of narrative inquiry. Given that we do not intend to produce a faithful representation of a reality independent of knowers, and that we do intend to generate a new relationship between researcher and participants, we bring, perhaps, a different set of concerns to questions of fictionalizing. However, in this article, we want to focus on three purposes for which fictionalization is used within different methodologies, including narrative inquiry.
Purpose 1: Protect and Blur Identities of Participants and Research Sites
The most common purpose for fictionalizing research texts began to emerge with the need to find ways to fulfill the ethical concerns around anonymity and confidentiality. Long before, narrative inquiry was named and around the time that case study methods began to be used, assigning pseudonyms for participants, research schools, and other research sites and places was widely in use. This became an accepted practice in research and was the most common form of fictionalization. It is not clear how much attention was given to selecting pseudonyms and whether there were considerations of how pseudonyms themselves were embedded within linguistic, cultural, and social narratives. We deal with concerns raised around the selection of particular pseudonyms later in this article.
Clandinin, Murphy, Huber, and Orr (2010) noted the frequent use of pseudonyms as a common form of fictionalizing in narrative inquiry. Clandinin (2013) highlighted that fictionalizing has been used to protect participants from being recognized, particularly as they share tension-filled stories of experience and practice.
When participants are uncertain about being too visible or too vulnerable as interim research texts are negotiated, sometimes strategies such as fictionalizing and blurring of times, places, and identities become part of the process of negotiation. (p. 201)
We see examples of using pseudonyms as a purpose for fictionalizing in Craig’s (2013) work with story constellations with multiple school sites. Craig assigned pseudonyms to schools and to participants and often linked school sites to metaphors that shape the school landscapes. She also worked to blur boundaries so it was not always clear just who was being referred to when she used quotations or identifying field texts such as transcripts and field notes. Her purposes were to protect participants from what might be damaging to them as persons if they became known. As Howes (2004) wrote,
When the need to speak grows into the desire to publish, ethics gets recast into guidelines that condition how talk can become a public text. For Claudia Mills, the “great value” of the “widespread sharing of real stories” must be balanced against the “painful” costs which can include the public embarrassment or even betrayal of others. But the psychological need to publish is still taken for granted, with ethics entering the equation explicitly when she hopes that the life writer will be a “responsible moral agent” who “will seek, if possible, to minimize” potential harm. (p. 247)
In this way, fictionalization through the use of pseudonyms becomes tied with ethics, at least in the sense of not doing harm by making it difficult to identify participants in research texts. As Mills (2004) described,
Another, less daunting way to reduce the costs to those whom we write about is to protect their identity in various ways: to share a person’s story but withhold the person’s name, changing revelatory (but irrelevant details) whenever possible. This points us toward sharing stories through fiction rather than through nonfiction. (p. 115)
Although Mills described what she was discussing using the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, we saw what she was doing as more akin to fictionalizing. She expanded this use of fictionalizing through suggesting that we change other details as well as names.
We see even more elaborate efforts to protect participants’ anonymity in work such as that of Ming Fang He (1998). She engaged in narrative inquiry with three Chinese teachers. Concerns for the well-being of participants lead her to compose what she calls composite narrative accounts of the three Chinese teachers. Her purposes were to protect participants from harm in politically sensitive situations. In composing the composite accounts, she does more than change names of people and places and does more than change what might be irrelevant details. She blurs the boundaries and, perhaps, she moves further along the line that Mills identifies between fact and fiction in her creation of fictionalized accounts. In these ways, fictionalization can be a way to take care not just of the story but the person who is telling the story. Here too we see links with ethical matters.
In our work as narrative inquirers, we are also aware that sometimes participants create fictionalized accounts of their experiences. We named these fictionalized accounts as cover stories (Clandinin & Connelly, 1995) drawing on the work of Crites (1971). Cover stories are told in ways and in places that allow participants to continue to live out their stories to live by (Connelly & Clandinin, 1999) and to engage in their practices in ways that keep them safe from more dominant stories. In many ways, the purposes that participants serve, that is, of keeping themselves safe from harm are similar to the purposes served by this first purpose of fictionalizing. We have also noticed that children engage in fictionalizing their lives, in and out of research conversations, and these fictionalized stories sometimes become part of the telling that children themselves choose.
At other times, we have engaged with teachers and youth who have purposefully chosen their own pseudonyms to reflect who they are or would like to become (Steeves, 2000). Early on “. . . we began to realize the complexities of how fictions are intertwined with stories to live by” (Clandinin & Connelly, 1995, p. 78). In this way, fictionalizing becomes part of identity making.
Purpose 2: A Process of Creating an Other to Tell More
We also see fictionalization as serving another purpose in narrative inquiry. Jean recalls being invited to become involved in a small project with 8- and 9-year-old children in a classroom with Annie Davies (1995) in Calgary. The children were learning to write both fiction and autobiographical nonfiction, and to learn to work with response of others in revisions of their writing. One child asked Jean to write her stories from her own childhood in response to the child’s stories. As Jean worked on the task, she created a third person other to write her stories of herself as a child. Although this is not unusual, it created a space for Jean to think about this creation of a third person as part of the fictionalizing process.
In Wounds of Passion, hooks (1997) described her processes of fictionalizing of herself as she writes in the third person.
As in the memoir Bone Black, I move back and forth between first person narration and third person. I conceptualize the third person voice as that part of myself that is an observer—that bears witness. At times I also use the third person as an attempt to distance myself from the pain. The inclusion of the third person narrator who has both critical insight and an almost psychoanalytic power that enables critical reflection on events is an act of mediation. When we rewrite the past, looking back with our current understanding, a mediation is always taking place. I give that mediation a voice rather than mask this aspect of any retrospective reflection on our lives. (p. xxii)
In what she writes of as an act of mediation, we see the place where fictionalizing comes into the process. She can both set herself somewhat apart to gain distance through this fictionalizing, this creation of an other, and allow herself to write about her experiences that might otherwise have remained silent.
This purpose of fictionalizing is, in part at least, an attempt to keep the author/researcher safe from being too vulnerable, too exposed. Again, we see the link between fictionalization and ethical matters. However, as hooks describes the use of the third-person account of what might be the autobiographical, we also see that fictionalization is a way to create enough distance to perhaps see one’s own experiences with new eyes, a strategy for making the familiar strange.
Purpose 3: Creating “As If” Worlds
Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there. (Feynman, 1985, np)
What we see as a third purpose for fictionalizing in research is perhaps, for us, the one that moves farthest away from the entanglement of fictionalizing with ethical considerations around harm and anonymity. In this purpose for fictionalizing, we see that fictionalization can be understood as analysis in another manner, creating another layer to deepen awareness. Although this purpose of fictionalizing is no less reliant on field texts, it provides a way for researchers and participants to understand their experiences in new ways, in different contexts. For us, this third purpose is closely linked with imagination. The quotation from Feynman helps us link fictionalizing with imagination.
This way of understanding fictionalizing allows a different kind of “reaching out” to weave a closer relationship with participant(s). Inviting participants into a fictional world storied out of the researcher’s and participant’s experiences generates a different kind of relation. In coming to co-inhabit a fictionalized world, the relationship between researcher and participant is woven more colorfully, expressing further imagining and playfulness (Caine & Steeves, 2009).
Sarbin (2004) helped us understand what we are doing in fictionalizing through creating “as if” worlds, places that are fictionalized but are being drawn from, and are in response to, lives and living. The worlds created are narrative constructions, fictionalized out of the stuff of memory and drawing on field texts that are composed and co-composed with participants. In this way, like Sarbin, we understand imagining as a form of perceptual and embodied knowing. Sarbin’s understandings of imagining speak to emplotted narratives alive with our embodied knowing and doing. Imaginings reach back to our remembered experiences and project forward toward “as if” stories we imagine and play out (Caine & Steeves, 2009). Lopez (1989) spoke not of truths explicitly stated but rather understanding evoked metaphorically in a story that resonates as one “that could happen” (p. 70).
In what follows, we turn to the work of three narrative inquirers who have used fictionalizing to serve a purpose of creating narrative constructions as a way of invoking imagination to understand more, to inquire more deeply into field texts. We first turn to Paley’s (1992) work, particularly her work using the fictionalized character of Magpie to evoke change in the relationships in her preschool classroom. We then turn to the work of Sewall (1994) who draws on his doctoral research and his experience in working in Northern schools and communities. Finally, we turn to Murphy’s work who drew on a fictionalized world he created for himself using a character named Sloughboy to inquire more deeply into the experiences of children who were part of his doctoral work.
Vivian Paley
Paley is a teacher researcher who worked for many years in Early Childhood settings. She authored many books where she drew on her experiences alongside young children and worked with field notes and audio recordings of children’s conversations. Her 1992 book exemplified her fictionalizing as she created an imagined “as if” world in which she composed a story of Magpie for the kindergarten children in her class. Paley was not solely concerned with representing the experiences of herself and the children in the classroom. Her intention in creating the fictionalized story using a character named Magpie was to give the children the opportunity to enter into its meaning, to consider the issue of what it means to be lonely and not a part of things. Her purpose was to draw on transcripts and field texts of the ongoing classroom and to use them to fictionalize a world in which the children could imagine living with the rule of “You can’t say you can’t play” (p. 3). The story was a fictionalization of her experience alongside children whom she taught. In this way, she engaged the children, drawing them into consider playing differently, at the same time unraveling the fixed script they had always lived out, a script that allowed them to exclude fellow classmates in their kindergarten play by saying that another child could not play.
Ian Sewall
Ian Sewall (1996) offered another example of fictionalizing for this third purpose. Sewall described a legendary sea monster Galupiluk who captures children in the hood of his parka when they wander out onto ice floes. He thought about the legend in relation to the children he was working with in his role as a community liaison worker in the Canadian North. Although he could be seen as creating a fiction, his account drew on his experience working with teachers and children and on his doctoral work with teachers from different countries around their experiences of the folkloral voice. His purpose was to show something of what he knew of the experiences of children in schools. Drawing on multiple field texts, including his own remembered experiences, he fictionalized the experiences of the children and gave them physical form in relation to a legendary creature who lived on the shifting ice. As he fictionalized his experiences alongside children, he wrote of being “awe struck these past months by the drama and number of our school children who seem to have found no way back to solid ground.” In his fictionalized account, he created a world in which teachers could imagine what children experience when we make them feel alone in classrooms, when they are vulnerable to being picked up by Galupiluk on the ice floes. He then invited himself and others to imagine themselves as parents who rush out upon the floes to rescue the children. He then invited himself and others to imagine themselves as teachers calling to the children from shore, experiencing “the frustration of knowing that I teach shore life to so many who live amongst the shifting floes” (Sewall, 1996, p. 6). Sewall’s fictionalizing serves the purpose of allowing him to draw on his experiences as parent, friend, teacher, and researcher to create a world that he can imagine himself within and that he can invite others into.
His purposes are clear, he uses this fictionalizing of his experiences to create a storied world which might create a kind of terra firma for the children who live on shifting ground. We hear echoes of his purposes for fictionalizing as also providing an opportunity for him and others to be a kind of witness, as hooks described, to the experience of himself and others. In this way, we see the story as a way to invite both listener and teller into a mutually created imaginative world.
Shaun Murphy
Shaun (2004) originally created a fictionalized world from his memories of growing up in a Northern Canadian community. Sloughboy was the main character in this fictionalized world, a world created around a slough, a place he stories as one that is forbidden to him. Shaun’s work with Sloughboy began with his experience and imagination; it grew into world-making, an “as if” story. The imagined world of Sloughboy became a significant part of Shaun’s narrative beginnings (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000), forming part of a yearlong study into the ways that children’s narrative knowledge is shaped in school contexts. Five children in a Grade 5/6 classroom in a multicultural urban school participated in a narrative inquiry focused on children’s stories to live by (Murphy, 2004) in school and the negotiations necessary to maintain their narrative coherence (Carr, 1986) within this context. The aim of the inquiry was to understand the knowledge made by children based on their experiences in familial and school contexts.
The fictionalized world of the slough was one that Shaun remembered as he began to experiment with a world into which he could “take” the children, with the purpose of coming to understand more about who they were and were becoming. Like Paley, Shaun created a fictionalized world, a world he imagined one of his participants, Leo, could be part of. Shaun, like Paley, was offering Leo a story to think with, a story that could shift the way he was thinking. Like Sewall, Shaun’s invitation to Leo to join with him in a fictionalized world created a story where Leo could have a say, where Leo could build a firmer ground.
Sloughboy was present in Shaun’s writing before he began his narrative inquiry and, when he reappeared in the inquiry, Shaun drew on him to shape a playful, relational way to inquire into children’s experiences while writing interim and final research texts. In Shaun’s narrative inquiry with the children, Sloughboy helped him stay wakeful to their lives as he and the children co-composed interim research texts. Shaun (Murphy, 2004) wrote,
Writing fictional interim texts allowed me to step back from field texts. This helped me see my research in a new way. I became intrigued by the ways the fictionalised pieces made me aware of elements in the field texts and research experience I do not think I would have recognized if I had not engaged in this writing process. I also became interested, as I created the fictionalized pieces, in the process of creating fiction in a research framework and what that meant in the process of moving from field texts to research texts. It became an exploration of moving in and out of worlds, the worlds of the children in the inquiry, the fictionalized world, and the world I inhabited as narrative inquirer. (pp. 45-46)
In the story of Leo, one of Shaun’s participants, whom Sloughboy referred to as Boy-who-would-be-seen, Shaun included direct pieces of transcripts where Leo told about his dreams. Furthermore, the name Boy-who-would-be-seen is a direct reference to a research conversation with Leo’s mother in which she told Shaun how an Elder had told her that during the year Leo would be recognized. This was significant because one identity thread, explored with Leo, was his visibility in his classroom. When Shaun took this Sloughboy story back to Leo, he recognized himself and immediately wanted to illustrate the story. His mother and larger family were also supportive of this representation of Leo.
In this third purpose of fictionalization, fictionalization provides a way to enter into field texts in a different manner, a way that requires an imaginative act. In terms of the relational co-compositional nature of narrative inquiry, it may also be a way to engage readers and participants in accessible ways that promote understanding; an opening for different possibilities.
Troubling fictionalization
In this article, we explored three purposes for fictionalization: (a) protection of the identities of participants, (b) creation of distance between ourselves and our experiences that allow us to “say more,” and (c) a way to engage in imagination that enriches research understandings. All three purposes for fictionalization can be at play in any one research study. Although we separated them into three distinct purposes, we realize different purposes may all be at work in some ways in each study. There may also be multiple other purposes for fictionalization in narrative inquiry. We see there are necessarily troubling aspects of the ease with which fictionalizing is taken up in narrative inquiry.
The first troubling aspect of fictionalizing comes most into evidence in the ways fictionalizing raises other ethical concerns. As we have highlighted, fictionalizing is a complex process; a process that needs to both consider the experiences of participants and researchers. Sometimes, researchers can begin to fictionalize texts without engaging in the complex process of negotiation that is part of narrative inquiry. In narrative inquiry with its attention to the relational ontology and methodology, we see that fields and field texts are always co-composed. In these co-compositions, there are always spaces for the voices of researchers and participants (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). These co-compositions reflect the negotiations of purpose, intentions, and possibilities, and it is within the context of these negotiations that fictionalization may occur.
The second troubling aspect of fictionalizing occurs when ethics boards or individual researchers assume that all participants want to have pseudonyms. Sometimes participants want to have an opportunity to use their “real” names. Without care and attention to the processes of fictionalization when pseudonyms are used, fictionalization can become paternalistic even as it has a protective purpose.
A third troubling aspect of fictionalizing occurs when researchers do not take care in the choices of pseudonyms we use with participants. Interestingly, researchers also may at times choose pseudonyms that do not consider the cultural or social contexts of the naming. Sometimes researchers choose pseudonyms out of their own cultural and linguistic narratives of experience and in their application to the stories of participants introduce a kind of cultural and social silencing. There is at times not enough consideration of the complexities researchers might introduce with statements such as “this research was undertaken in a small Midwestern town” and participants were given common English language names such as John or Susan.
Conclusion
We outline three purposes for fictionalization and raise concerns about the different purposes and aspects of fictionalizing that are particularly troubling. We found the first two purposes of fictionalization may seem deceptively straightforward, initiated as ways to reduce harm to either participants or researchers. In these purposes for fictionalization, there is perhaps a “taken for grantedness,” a sense that if all is well in terms of answering University Ethics Board questions we do not need to consider complex questions, some of which we raised here. We see the third purpose of fictionalization as holding particular promise for engaging in narrative inquiry. The third purpose of fictionalizing as illustrated here shows what might be possible when the embrace of imagination in relationship is expressed in a playfulness through the fictionalizing that carries participant and researcher understandings to new and unanticipated understandings and insights. Here fictionalization helps us comprehend what is at work. The third purpose often reflects an extensive engagement with participants and considers experiences and lives as always in the making. It is here that possibilities, rather than harms, are central.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Vera Caine is funded through a CIHR New Investigator Award.