Enhancing the collective, protecting the personal: the valuable role of composite narratives in medical education research

Composite fictions/stories

Piper and Sikes [24]

‘… we developed an ethnographic, composite fictional, storied approach … we fictionalised the accounts we were given—creating characters, contexts, and settings—inventing dialogue and crafting plots, but at the same time we did not make up ‘anything that directly related to peoples’ experiences and perceptions … we didn’t include everything because some events and occurrences were so singular that it would have been impossible to entirely disguise and anonymise them’ [36].’ [24, p. 568]

Composite first-person narrative (CFPN)

Wertz et al. [18]

‘The composite first-person narrative is a reflective story. It draws a composite picture of the phenomenon emerging from the informants. The composite is not a simple re-telling. It is interpretation by the researcher in several important ways: through her knowledge of the literature regarding the phenomenon under enquiry, through listening and hearing the stories told by the informants, and through her own reflexivity during the process … Use of the personal pronoun “I” is essential to the method. It indicates the composite-informant in the first-person sense as someone who typifies the general experience within a living and situated context.’ [18, p. 2–3]

Biglino et al. [37]

‘The composite first-person narrative is a reflective story and results in a representation of the phenomenon amalgamating the voices of multiple participants … A composite approach incorporating narratives unearthed through formative research allows the researchers to use factually realistic details and shape a unified story’ [37, p. 3].

Composite life history/composite life story

Taber [38]

“I endeavoured to create a story that would highlight important aspects of each woman’s life as relates to the themes common to each, thus combining paradigmatic processes focused on common experiences and narrative processes focused on individual stories. This further connects the particular to the general, with an emphasis on social phenomena and organization” [38, p. 19].

Composite narratives

Willis [23]

“‘composite narratives’, in which a number of interviews are combined and presented as a story from a single individual” [23, p. 472].

McElhinney & Kennedy [8]

‘Composite narratives … blend a number of accounts to convey an appreciation of individual experience whilst maintaining the anonymity of participants’ [8, p. 2].

Creese et al. [11]

‘Composite narratives … involve the use of data from several interviews to tell a story framed as that of a single individual’ [11, p. 5].

Johnston et al. [33]

‘Composite narratives are stories that are woven together to represent interview data from multiple participants, presenting complex ideas in a way that can impact on audiences and maximise reader resonance’ [33, p. 2].

Ethnography

Piper and Sikes [24]

Narrative interviews

Written narratives

(n = 25+)

‘Composite fictions’

First-person account with characters, settings, context, and plots created to protect identities of participants

Phenomenology

Biglino et al. [37]

Creative writing, drawing, audio recordings of workshop

(n = 5)

First-person narrative

Three research group members each produced a composite narrative, these were combined to produce a single final narrative

Wertz et al. [18]

Interviews

Nosek (n = 19)

Wertz (n = 15)

Marlow (n = 17)

McNeish (n = 15)

First-person narratives

Aim to convey both structure (narratives illustrate the main themes) and texture (richness of participants’ experiences)

Narrative research

McElhinney and Kennedy [8]

Interviews, Biographical written narrative, Autoethnography

(n = 9)

First-person narratives

Combined narrative data from participants with autoethnography, narrative arcs, phraseology and style of individual narratives incorporated

Willis [39]

Interviews

(n = 14)

Third-person narratives

Descriptions of interviews with composite characters. Direct quotations from transcripts incorporated into narratives

Taber [38]

Interviews (life history research)

(n = 3)

First-person narrative

Combined text from all interview transcripts to create a composite

Qualitative framework analysis

Creese et al. [11]

Interviews

(n = 48)

Third-person narratives

Scaffolded by theoretical framework

Grounded theory

Johnston, Wildy & Shand [33]

Interviews

(n = 25)

First-person narratives

24 narratives produced, one to illustrate each of the findings