Fiction and Reality

Fritz Gaenslen
Additional contact information
Fritz Gaenslen: American College of Switzerland

Sociological Methods & Research, 1982, vol. 10, issue 4, 379-420

Abstract: Although the relationship between fiction and reality would seem to be of general concern to social scientists interested in the unobtrusive observation of social processes, systematic empirical evidence concerning this relationship is hard to come by. This study examines 1000 cases of interpersonal conflict resolution drawn from contemporary Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and American fiction and discusses, under the broad headings of reliability and validity, a number of objections to taking these cases as “real.†More specifically, it is argued and/or demonstrated (1) that fiction can be read reliably, (2) that fiction is more about “life†than “art,†(3) that fiction is always in part mimetic, and (4) that while authors of fiction may choose their outcomes, they tend to be constrained by reality in depicting the processes that produce these outcomes. This last conclusion is based on a comparison between relationships found in the fiction and 36 propositions drawn from the social science literature.

Date: 1982
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0049124182010004001 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:somere:v:10:y:1982:i:4:p:379-420

DOI: 10.1177/0049124182010004001

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Sociological Methods & Research
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().