Fiction as Research Practice (Developing Qualitative Inquiry)

by Patricia Leavy

The turn to fiction as a social research practice is a natural extension of what many researchers and writers have long been doing. Patricia Leavy, a widely published qualitative researcher and a novelist, explores the overlaps and intersections between these two ways of understanding and describing human experience. She demonstrates the validity of literary experimentation to the qualitative researcher and how to incorporate these practices into research projects. Five short stories and excerpts from novellas and novels show these methods in action. This book is an essential methodological introduction for those interested in studying or practicing arts-based research.

316 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 2013

About the author

Patricia Leavy, Ph.D., is a bestselling author. She has published over fifty books, earning commercial and critical success in both fiction and nonfiction, and her work has been translated into many languages. Patricia has received over 100 book honors as well as career awards from the New England Sociological Association, the American Creativity Association, the American Educational Research Association, the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, and the National Art Education Association. In 2024 the London Arts-Based Research Centre established "The Patricia Leavy Award for Arts-Based Research." She lives in Maine with her family. Patricia loves writing, reading, watching films, and traveling. These days, she's focused on writing feel-good love stories.

Reviews

[Kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very encouraging take on the writing styles for educational research, especially as Leavy frequently promotes the idea only briefly mentioned in Barone & Eisner's (1997) chapter on Arts-Based Educational Research that one of the tasks of arts- and fiction-based researcher is to create a virtual reality. If only these ideas could be linked to the possibilities now present in digital technology, but it seems to be more of a conceptual space in one's mind. And much like the short ABER chapter as it compares to Barone & Eisner's (2012) weightier Arts-based Research, Leavy seems to say more about fiction with less pages as she did in her own edited anthology (2018) Handbook of Arts-Based Research. Is it possible that just like present-day VR experiences, they work better in short-form rather than the longer, more cinematic narratives that never quite tell the same story? The novellas, short stories and opening chapters of longer novels convey the captivating feel of reality filtered through the researcher's mind, yet the surrounding chapters only touch upon the general points. Perhaps that is all that is needed in research, less of a sprawling Tolstoyian epic and more of the impactful human nature studies found in Chekhov's short stories such as Ward 6.

[Mills College Library]

807.2 L4399 2013