AESTHETIC FORMS OF DATA REPRESENTATION IN QUALITATIVE FAMILY THERAPY RESEARCH

Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, Jan 2005 by Piercy, Fred P, Benson, Kristen

In this article we provide a rationale for using alternative, aesthetic methods of qualitative representation (e.g., creative writing, art, music, performance, poetry) in qualitative family therapy research. We also provide illustrative examples of methods that bring findings to life, and involve the audience in reflecting on their meaning. One problem with such forms of data representation has been that, until recently, there have not been standards with which to evaluate them. We summarize evolving standards and explain when the forms are appropriate and when they are not. We also address issues of legitimacy and conflicting standards held by others.

"The voice of the poet is needed in our prose-flattened world."

(Brueggemann, 2003)

Family therapy researchers can expand considerably the ways in which they represent and share their findings. In this article, we will examine several evocative ways to share qualitative findings that can bring them to life, and involve the audience in reflecting on their meaning.

Eisner (1997) reminds us that most people use a variety of ways to convey what they know-stories, pictures, theater, demonstrations, and poetry-and that most of these approaches are "as old as the hills" (p. 5). So, in a way, our thesis is not as radical or strange as it might first appear. Most forms of qualitative representation have been with us a long time. They simply represent different ways to reflect experience. As Eisner (1997) states:

We report the temperature even when we are interested in the heat; we expect a reader to be able to transform the numbers representing the former into the experience that constitutes the latter. New forms of data representation signify our growing interest in inventing ways to represent the heat. (p. 7)

Some ethnographers use performances (increasingly known as "performance texts") to capture their findings. For example, sociologists Becker, McCall, and Morris (1989) read a script at a scientific meeting that included themselves and their informants. They adopted a moving, quasi-storytelling format that transformed their work into a collaborative project that gave voice to both participants and researchers. The authors reported that they "felt" the experiences of their participants as they enacted them. This format also made the research process more visible and alive to outsiders; the researchers and participants became real people (Denzin, 1997). Such methods of bringing findings to life are applicable to research topics in the field of family therapy.

For example, a marriage and family therapy (MFT) doctoral student (Karuppaswamy, 2000) conducted interviews with family therapy graduate students and faculty to understand how her disability affected them and their accommodation to her. (Karuppaswamy had polio as a child, and uses a motorized scooter to get around.) She analyzed the data for themes and then wrote a play that captured her findings through movement, dialogue, and story. For her performance of the play, she assigned parts to volunteer students in her qualitative research class. Karuppaswamy played herself, and several students played the voice of the "department" and others played "students." There was also a "narrator" and "stage manager," who commented on the cultural and pragmatic issues around the department's accommodation of her disability, and of her as a person. The volunteers read their parts by using a script, and all quotes were from the actual interview transcripts.

Karuppaswamy (2000) organized quotes according to the themes she found around accommodation. One group of students, for example, she called "waiters" because they were not too quick to offer support; they allowed Karuppaswamy to initiate the contact. One waiter confided, "I was afraid that if I focused on the disability in the very beginning, that you would think I didn't see the real you inside" (p. 11). Their play allowed the class to know-both affectively and intellectually-more about both Karuppaswamy's experience and the human process of inclusion and accommodation.

However, Denzin (1997) warns that such ethnodramas (Mienczakowski, 1995) and performance texts, if presented as "Truth," run the risk of perpetuating the fallacy of early ethnography, in which researchers attempted to capture the "true" culture and represent it as it "really" is. Instead, Denzin suggests a different stance: To use alternative forms of data presentation, such as this play, as postmodern methods that invite and embrace direct experience and multiple interpretations of ethnographic findings. Denzin believes that such alternative forms of presentation can and should engage the audience in the process of reflection and meaning making but avoid the epistemological problems of truth claims.

Similarly, Lather (1997) did not want to privilege any one reality in her portrayal of the experiences of women she studied who were living with AIDS. Consequently, she mixed the narrative accounts of her participants' stories with "researcher interpretive moves and retraction of such moves, and 'factoid' boxes, all juxtaposed with . . . intertexts that bring moments of sociology, history, poetry, popular culture, and 'determined policy talk' into a network of levels" (p. 255). That is, she built a complexity intended to invite confusion, reflection, and multiple interpretations. Tierney and Lincoln's (1997) Representation and the eText addresses such concerns with narrative voice and what realities are represented in textual representations.