Karen O'Reilly

My book Qualitative Research Methods for Everyone: An Essential Toolkit was published by Policy Press in March. In it I briefly mention ‘free indirect speech’ and ‘blended stories’ as ways to anonymise while still being true to people’s accounts and lives. 

Blended stories and free indirect speech are techniques that can be used to anonymise quotes or stories, while keeping them faithful to the speaker, their accounts, and to the lives of the participants. 

In free indirect speech the person is quoted using the style of the speaker but without using a direct quote – maybe because you don’t want it to be easily identifiable or maybe because it is how you recall it. Journalists use the technique liberally to recall something they heard but cannot precisely remember. It is the meaningthat is deemed important to the writer and reader rather than the exact words. Ethnographers have to use the technique a lot as they have often not recorded what was said and are relying on memory. Ethnographers thus need to acknowledge that their quotes are from fieldnotes rather than being direct quotes. But it is also a useful approach for quoting someone without using exact words or phrases that are familiar to others involved, and would otherwise identify them. 

We used free indirect speech in an exhibition in Hong Kong to celebrate the end of our research project ‘Lifestyle Migration in East Asia.’ We invited our participants to the exhibition and also ask them to first check they approved how we had written about them. 

Blended stories (see Jones 2004) are accounts or stories blended together to capture an essence rather than an identifiable person. This is done to ensure anonymity, or when recording was not possible, or when evoking a type of event or emotion rather than a specific one. 

In focus groups it will probably be difficult or impossible to attribute individual quotes to identified participants but at least mention what you can (eg male, female, patient, carer, or whatever). This is when blended accounts and free direct speech become useful (Chapter 3). 

Use blended stories and free indirect speech where it is helpful and meaningful. 

As a reminder, free indirect speech involves quoting a style of phrase rather than exact words, and blended stories are accounts or narratives that are blended together to capture an essence or meaning rather than an identifiable person (see Chapter 3 in Qualitative Research Methods for Everyone). 

Jones, R. (2004) ‘Blended Voices: Crafting a Narrative from Oral History Interviews’, The Oral History Review, 31(1): 23–42.