Fiction as Research Practice

Patricia Leavy is an independent scholar, formerly associate professor and chairperson of the Sociology & Criminology Department and the founding director of the Gender Studies Program at Stonehill College in Easton, MA, USA. She is the author of Iconic Events: Media, Politics and Power in Retelling History (2007), Method Meets Art: Arts-Based Research Practice (2009), Oral History: Understanding Qualitative Research (2011), and Low-Fat Love (2011); coauthor of Feminist Research Practice: A Primer (2007) and The Practice of Qualitative Research (2d ed. 2010); and co-editor of Hybrid Identities: Theoretical and Empirical Examinations (2008), Handbook of Emergent Methods (2008), Emergent Methods in Social Research (2006), and Approaches to Qualitative Research: A Reader on Theory and Practice (2004). She is also the editor of the Oxford University Press book series Understanding Qualitative Research, and series editor for the Sense Publishers book series Social Fictions.

• Part I Fiction as Research Practice; Chapter 1 Blurred Genres: The Intertwining of Fiction and Nonfiction; Chapter 2 The Possibilities of Fiction-Based Research: Portraying Lives in Context; Chapter 3 Designing a Project: Fiction-Based Research Practice; Chapter 4 Evaluating Fiction-Based Research; Part II Exemplars with Commentary; Short Stories; Chapter 5 The Scrub Club, Elizabeth Bloom; Chapter 6 Visual Music, John L. Vitale; Novella; Chapter 7 The Wrong Shoe, Elizabeth de Freitas; Novels; Chapter 8 Waiting Room, Cheryl Dellasega; Chapter 9 Low-Fat Love, Patricia Leavy; Part III Conclusion; Chapter 10 Fiction as Pedagogy;

"Fiction as Research Practice: Short Stories, Novellas, and Novels serves as a great introduction to fiction-based research. Leavy does a great job of explaining how the emergent research method of fiction-based research can be conducted, evaluated, and used."Frances Kalu, Alberta Journal of Educational Research, Vol. 62.1, Spring 2016