The Ethical and Methodological Dilemma of Questioning the Truthfulness of a Participant’s Story: Using “Circulating Reference” to Enhance the Validity of Qualitative Research

Abstract

The question of how to enhance validity in qualitative research has been thoroughly debated. In this debate, however, the truthfulness of participants’ stories is rarely questioned. But what do you do if you, while working within a critical realist perspective, come across a story that seems almost too incredible to be true? This dilemma of The Almost Too Incredible Story is ethical as well as methodological. In this article, I suggest that it is best handled by conceptualizing the process of qualitative inquiry in terms of Bruno Latour’s concept “circulating reference”. The dilemma is then addressed through a stepwise process starting with (1) analysing all material as if all were believed to be true; (2) retracing the role of the data you question through the study’s ladder of circulating reference; (3) retracing the role of the data in the researcher’s transformed understanding of the phenomenon; and (4) using the results of these steps to determine whether The Almost Too Incredible Story poses a genuine threat to the validity of the results. If the validity is threatened, the researcher may decide to (a) return to the participant to clarify; (b) trust and keep the story; (c) discard all the data from this participant from the analysis; or (d) discard only the data that does not align with other participants’ account. Through this systematic process, the researcher can determine the best course of action for keeping the research as truthful as possible while also honouring the participant’s contribution.