In the second of this series of jottings I broached the issue of fictional data and their authenticity/lack of authenticity in sociology.
What about Ken Loach’s I Daniel Blake, a film I’ve seen twice, the second time at UCL’s Institute of Global Health prior to my participation in a panel discussion and question-and-answer session on it (a recording of this event is available on my website – www.grahamscambler.com – so I can’t rethink or edit what I said). Clearly Loach’s film is not sociology. But in a previous reincarnation I was firmer and less circumspect on this than I am now. I still don’t see it as sociology, but I certainly accept it as an authentic statement on 21st century Tory Britain. Why? Because I am aware from Trussell Trust’s foodbank statistics and studies like Kayleigh Garthwaite’s excellent s Hunger Pains that Loach’s portrayal is accurate as well as hitting the right buttons. Daniel’s experience is commonplace at the desperate end of the working-class spectrum, and is seeping well into working-class and middle-class precarity. So it is a film that ‘fits’ the evidence. The film articulates – communicates – an evidence-based reality. Authentic? As realist/political art, yes of course; as sociology, well …
Maybe the authentic/inauthentic binary is inappropriate. Or maybe these terms should not be deployed as adjectives to describe, qualify data.
What about semi-fictional accounts of others’ experiences? I once interviewed a sex worker and might write up an episode she alluded to in these terms:
Lana, aged 26, worked for a London-based escort agency out of a flat which she rented and shared with a friend, another escort, who had also travelled over from Latvia. Her parents were unaware of her job – she’d told them she was a secretary – but told her that they were planning an impromtu visit. In something of a panic Lana informed her parents that she was in the process of changing accommodation and arranged with a friend who did not ‘work’ to pretend that the latter’s was the new home. She transferred a few of her personal belongings there. Her parents stayed at Lana’s ‘new apartment’ for a weekend, saw a few London sights and left for Latvia having enjoyed seeing their daughter and their trip. Lana, not altogether unfamiliar with extricating herself from difficult situations, returned to her flat, breathed a sigh of relief and re-inhabited her familiar world.
This is a representation of a real and documented episode that I might easily have cited (in a published paper over a decade ago called, I think, ‘Sex work stigma’ – in the journal Sociology). I’ve not re-read either my interview notes or the paper and have here reconstructed the details; but the point of this now-quasi-fictional case study remains unambiguous: the felt stigma associated with sex work still resonates and can strike at the very heart of notably brave, hardy and resilient women. Would it be wrong to incorporate such a semi-fictional account in a published text?
Then there’s the unambiguously fictional case study. I have drawn on these more than once of late (in Sociology, Health and the Fractured Society and in a paper on ‘dimensions of vulnerability’ recently revised for a peer-review journal). In my book I constructed a case study to allow for an evidence-based consideration of the ways in which capital or ‘asset flows’ protective of health can both vary over time and compensate the one for the other (eg a drop off in the flow of material assets due to DWP sanctions can in part be compensated by a strong flow of social assets). In the paper I used a fictional case study as a heuristic device. It was – and I would insist on this here – an evidence-based and therefore justified ‘hypothetical’ representation of a person on the wrong end of mutliple vulnerabilities. The fictional case study was a device to elucidate researched social realities.
So where does this leave me?
I’m inclined to say that – rather like ‘credible’ autoethnographical sociological inputs – semi-fictional and fictional representations and case studies are an acceptable part of/adjunct to ‘doing sociology’, to the ‘sociological project’, to the extent that they are not only compatible with, but reflective of, a documented research base. To convince, this must be made unambiguously clear. In other words, they are persuasive to the extent to which their roots in sociological research can be demonstrated.
In light of this stricture, it might be argued that I Daniel Blake is ‘an acceptable part of/adjunct to ‘doing sociology’’. My view on this has changed over the years. The clincher would be if Ken Loach or his team placed in the public domain the research that warranted the making of the film.