Producing the Participants of Research: Trustworthiness as Convenient Fiction (Poster 4)

• In Event: Manufacturing Trustworthiness in Qualitative Research

Abstract

In this poster, we sunder the concept of trustworthiness through an analysis of how researchers create ‘participants’ out of people. We begin with simple questions: what is a participant, and how do we know one when we see them? Such questions sensitize us to the fact that research is not judged on how well participants are represented, but rather, on the extent to which participants appear “as a recognizable structure” (St. Pierre, 2014, p. 6) to readers. Research participants are pseudonymous, lacking a physicality beyond words, free from grammatical errors, without need or want—trustworthiness gained through dehumanization. Rather than an effort to recreate the thing itself–the ‘actual’ subject with whom we conduct research–we, ironically, use rich, thick description (Geertz, 1973) to present a sanitized version of the human subject stripped of vitality and agency, works of fiction birthed by pens and memories—simulacra (Baudrillard, 1994). These fragments of people, these collections of bits and pieces are given names and vivified in research as participants—form and function but no life—a nametag with no body (Author 1 et al., 2018). Simultaneously, we dehumanize ourselves to create ‘authors.’ We may critique notions of objectivity in our work but we still perform the god trick (Haraway, 1988) as expected by our readers and traditional notions of ‘trustworthiness.’ We have flaws but admit to none lest we appear ‘untrustworthy’ as reporters of research findings. We write ‘objectively’ to appear to maintain a distance from our participants that signals ethical interaction, lest we belie forbidden attachments (Ahmed, 2014). In that way, the less we disclose, the more credible we are. To achieve trustworthiness in research, people cannot appear on the page.

The purpose of this poster presentation is to bring into explicit awareness how we critique notions of objectivity in our previous research (e.g., Author 2 et al, 2015) while still engaging in the appearance of these practices to gain the trust of readers. We seek to move beyond simply creating the appearance of trustworthiness, the fictions that hold lease in qualitative reports, and towards a space where what is ‘real’ is more credible. We explore both how we use writing to produce participants and how we use writing to produce ourselves as authors. Instead, we seek to encourage a new type of ‘trustworthiness’ in qualitative research that is transparent, honest, and living—that is as partial, messy, and uncertain as the world it seeks to study.

To ground this analysis, we revisit our own experiences as researchers engaged in interview studies and explore the omissions we made in research reports about participants in the name of trustworthiness. Specifically, our data sources are examples from those previous studies in which we actively chose to elide details about those interviews or the characteristics of the people with whom we engaged to produce them as participants and ourselves as trustworthy qualitative researchers.

Authors

• Jessica Van Cleave, Gardner-Webb University

• Travis Marn, Southern Connecticut State University