Empirical Fiction: Composite Character Narratives in Analytical Sociology

Abstract

AbstractThis paper discusses methods for using narratives of composite characters in qualitative social scientific writing. When anonymization is required, authors can use composite narratives to better protect participants, to compress data into intelligible sequences, and to avoid problematic claims to scientific authority. However, to date, authors of composite texts have failed to adequately explain how they deal with problems of sampling, selection, and sequence from an analytical perspective.Analytical qualitative researchers interested in creating composite character narratives can learn lessons, both positive and negative, from other forms of fiction that are in common usage in sociology. Drawing on a variety of fictive methods for clustering together cases and determining the objective possibility of narrative elements, this paper proposes a method of constructing composite narratives that forces their author to abductively construct theory and interrogate the narratives’ causal logics. The Sequence-Based Composites (SBC) method is explained with reference to four criteria for evaluating empirically grounded social scientific arguments: reliability, reactivity, representativeness, and replicability. Examples of composite character construction are drawn from an ethnographic study of news production in Turkey.