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THE REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION
1 (2001): 212-214
© 2001 National Communication Association

Reporting the Human Elements of Social Science Research

Reta A. Gilbert

Anna Banks and Stephen P. Banks. Fiction & Social Research: By Ice or Fire. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2000. iv + 272 pages. Notes, index. $62.00.

In a moment of academic uncertainty, I once asked a dean if my newspaper writing would count as the academic contribution required of all professors. A social scientist, he looked me straight in the eye and said, “There’s nothing wrong in writing for real people. In fact, I find it refreshing when academic writing can be understood by a broad public audience.” The secret I soon discovered was the appeal of stories. Narratives that involve the reader do more than report events; sometimes a story written well enough can move the reader to a kind of identification uncommon in facts-only reporting.

What can fiction add to our repertoire as communication teachers and researchers? Anna Banks’ and Stephen Banks’ Fiction & Social Research: By Ice or Fire is filled with answers. “What fiction can do that no other sort of expression does,” argues Stephen Banks, “is evoke the emotion of felt experience and portray the values, pathos, grandeur and spirituality of the human condition” (17). Fiction gives us a more inclusive, a fuller, view. In another chapter, Sandra Harrsager reveals the power of narrative journalism using examples of potent writing from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists (51-65).

But what about truth? Anna Banks, quoting Ortiz Cofer, explains, “Stories are an attempt to tell a truth by creating material in which that truth can be enacted” (167). Fiction is not inherently false or untrue although the popular stereotype claims otherwise. David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, in an apology to his readers last November after publishing an article filled with inaccuracies, wrote, “What you cannot do is undermine the readers’ understanding of what is fiction and what is nonfiction and the line between the two.” An imaginatively created story may explain an idea in ways that nonfiction cannot. If meaning is created by the transaction between writer and reader, then the way the story is told may well determine whether meaning has been created. Fiction is not an antonym for truth. The authors in Fiction and Social Research argue that fictive reporting of research is truer to the individual’s experience than the rational-only reports required by scientific inquiry.

For some the very idea of using fiction as data for scholarly discourse or as a method for reporting research results raises questions. Where are the traditional standards of objectivity and distance from the results that many of us were taught was what made scholarly discourse special? “What I try to do,” reports Michelle Miller in chapter 4, “is to explore the more human elements of social science inquiry” (68). Miller uses dramatically scripted narratives that “provide possibilities for layering and interweaving of voices, theories, statistics, and accounts of the research process” (69). The result is a many-faceted, rich report not possible using expository techniques alone. This situation is not unlike the advice given to journalists to show not tell the results of their observation. The authors in this text argue that abandoning intellectual distance will result in research reports more true to life and with more impact on readers.

For Robert Krizak, to duplicate the traditionally accepted procedures of research report writing “correspondingly limits the potential for advancing the personal, the creative, or ultimately, a truly innovative perspective” (91). He urges that those of us in communication studies have a responsibility to “take advantage of our disciplines’ specific foci and theoretical sensitivities to recreate the interactions we witness in the cultural settings we enter” (93).

The task of interpreting ethnographic findings within a fictive context or within a postmodern sensibility is not an easy chore. Gottschalk uses Rosenau’s (1992) list of challenges to those who would attempt this new approach. They will be “more alert to the social psychological dispositions [a study] may encourage, more modest about truth and authority claims, more critically self-reflective with regard to subjectivity and more self-conscious about linguistic and narrative strategies” (206).

Firmly grounded in the new theories of ethnographic research writing discussed and illustrated in anthropology journals during the last ten years, Banks and Banks have produced a collection of essays that extend the communication scholars’ research reporting options. Both beginning and more experienced investigators will find insightful narrative examples tucked away in nearly every chapter.

Those new to the academic research game will appreciate the first chapter, entitled “The Struggle Over Facts and Fictions,” which consists of an interview between Banks & Banks and Kaja Alilunas, a theoretical physicist and novelist, on the process of editing Fiction and Social Research. The authors demonstrate practices often minimally reported in communication journals. For communication specialists, this may be our call to join the research world of the twenty-first century.

Reta A. Gilbert is a professor of communication studies at Eastern Washington University.