The Social Worker—A Novel: The Advantages of Fictional Re-Presentations of Life Narratives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Publication of The Social Worker: A Novel (Ungar, 2011b) is an example of how fiction can be used to re-present life narratives from qualitative research. Contrasting samples of text from multiple modes of my writing (fiction, trade nonfiction, professional, and academic), I highlight four aspects of the novel that are congruent with qualitative inquiry: (a) fiction challenges writers and readers to shed assumptions by immersing us in the world of the other; (b) fiction exposes that which is not named or too intuitive to be crisply identified, opening possibilities to articulate discursively marginal points of view; (c) fiction makes clear the presence of the narrator; and (d) fiction acknowledges that the reader is actively present, interpreting that which is read. Discussion of each of these four aspects of re-presentation suggests congruence between the goals of qualitative research and the performance of writing fiction. The complex relationship between subjectivity and this performance is explored.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.037 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".