Producing Participants: Trustworthiness as Convenient Fiction

Trustworthiness in qualitative research reports is considered a marker of quality and rigor. That rigor relies on factors like transparency and reflexivity, or the extent to which a researcher can accurately and clearly—read: believably—write the story of the research, the participants, and themselves. In this article, we argue that all representations of research participants, including the researchers themselves, are fiction, and distinctions between fiction and the “real” are actually undesirable when the goal is to maintain (or establish) trustworthiness. Indeed, it is essential to the research report not to claim those fictions but instead to establish verisimilitude by combining compelling descriptions with compulsory claims to the real. As such, we emphasize that trustworthiness is not an attribute of research that a study either has or does not; rather, we argue it is something authors achieve through a carefully constructed, fictionalized account of their research.