Article reviewed: Yazell, B., Petersen, K., Marx, P. et al.

The role of literary fiction in facilitating

social science research. Humanity and Social Sciences Communications 8, 261 (2021).
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00939-y

According to the article, “The role of literary fiction in facilitating social science research”,
the author argues that not only literary fiction can be able to draw concepts from social sciences
published works but the same course can also happen the other way around as they almost shared
similar interests – understanding of human.
One of the main points that the authors have put to the table is that literary fictions can
provide deeper and distinct perspective of human behavior and emotions that the social scientists
cannot bring to light using conventional methodologies. They argue that works of fiction can be
used to investigate intricacies of various social phenomena and discover new perspective that may
help explain underlying cause of human behavior. The concept of interdisciplinary, which is
common in different branches of science, may have been also applicable to the discipline of literary
fiction and social sciences. Being innovative and flexible can help researchers to solve complex
problems in the modern world. Such points and claims are founded through open-ended
questionnaires and typology.
The idea that the authors presented in their thesis statement is very fascinating and
immediately caught my interest. Without reading this article, I have not realized the possible
connection between the two disciplines. The proposition that literary fictions and social sciences
may have a two-way kind of relationship introduce an interesting thought that there is another way
to study human society other than a traditional and costly researches.
However, there are flaws to this assertion made. First, most of literary fictions are very
subjective and mainly based on the personal experience of the writer which may result to
inaccurate interpretation and representation of social phenomena and human behavior. Findings
based on literary narratives may not be as significant as the research papers as they may not
certainly happen in real-life scenario, thus making it irrelevant in explaining the ways of the
humans and how societies work.
Another issue with the proposed idea is the failure to include proofs of how literary fictions
can be utilized on studies in the field of social sciences. This makes the claim of the authors fall
under the category of a mere speculation. In spite of that, let say for a moment that it is possible
to use literary fictions as reference for a social science research, still it will lead to another
shortcoming of failing to present a detailed strategy on how to put this kind of method into
practice. There’s also no mention on what types of data analysis should be done to be able to
integrate the information provided by the literary fiction into a traditional research.
Overall, although the idea of utilizing the literary fictions as a reference for social science
researches as how the former draws concepts and inspiration from the latter, there still not enough
foundation as the article lacks concrete evidences. Another thing that the critique have noticed is
that the article did not mention of any issues that can be encountered in using fictional works as a
basis of a social science research. However, there is no doubt that the author raised an interesting
subject matter and has the potential to be pursued further.