The Preamble of The Story Completion Method under Covid-19 Pandemic, especially in Authoritarian Regimes

The ethnography, as a methodology, epistemology and ontology as well, has increasingly resided in social sciences research, industry markets and broader social domains. When encountered with Covid-19 pandemic, it is necessary to adhere to the well-established common ethics in this field, such as the core principle of care, serious concerns of informed consent, mitigation of institutional risk, anonymity, deception, sex and intimacy, compensation, taking leave, and accurate portrayal, etc. (summarized by Boellstorff, Tom, Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce, and T. L. Taylor in Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method. Princeton University Press.2012.)

More important and urgent, we should develop a system of caveats in correspondence with new “normalcy” under this on-going pandemic. Broadly speaking, ethnography is hardly expected to be a statically consistent method, which is not something to anchor with, but something you learn and create in the field with sensitivity and adaptivity to different populations under different circumstances. So, this preamble is specific to “the story completion method” under the Covid-19 Pandemic, especially in authoritarian regimes. Here, authoritarian regimes refer to political entities that provide basic material security, but limited liberties, such limited free speech and association rights to people, with marks like surveillance, domination and strict regulation over individual privacy. During Covid-19, these kinds of violations of human rights are legitimated and justified in the name of containing the pandemic.

The story completion method is a writing method involving the use of story “stems”, in which a fictional character is introduced and commonly, they face a dilemma they need to resolve. Participants are asked to complete the story. The completed narratives are then analyzed for what they reveal about understandings, discourses or imaginaries concerning the topic of the story stems. By employing this method, its “fictional” characteristic can address a tension between the execution of free speech and privacy protection under authoritarian surveillance directly, to protect participants as much as possible, while also to gain honest and rich research data.

As researchers, besides the basic ethics mentioned above, we understand the importance of the following:

  1. When designing the story “stems”, we should be cautious about the potential risks for some sensitive topics. Even though the method is based on the “fictional” assumption, all narratives are documented online could be reported and used as the evidence in the court for various reasons and purposes.
  2. When recruiting participants, we should inform participants of research purposes, and potential risks honestly, and introduce the research process completely with examples in detail.
  3. When analyzing data, we should avoid intertwining and mingling opinions of participants and fictional characters, without over-explanation and over-guess the “real” implications of the participant’s completion story.
  4. When write conclusions and publish major findings, we should emphasize that they are imagining capabilities, thought patterns, meaning makings, assuming proclivities that we discern in the research, rather than the revealing of the reality of first-person’s perspective.