Fairy tales and metaphors - a novel way to write up a PhD

This presentation will explore a novel approach to the retelling of participants’ stories using fairy tales, pushing boundaries and broadening thinking by transforming data through analysis and interpretation, utilising the author’s skills of creative writing and art from her professional practice as a researcher and nurse teacher.

The use of extended metaphors such as children’s stories and fairy tales to approach a doctoral thesis as a text is fairly new but some academics have attempted to do this. The use of metaphor has been advocated as an approach to describe the complex relational process in realist methodology, with the metaphorical device of Context, Mechanism and Outcome (CMO) configurations from Pawson and Tilley’s seminal text Realist Evaluation (1997) used to achieve all realist explanations (Emmel et al 2018).

The findings of this realist evaluation PhD study showed that clinical leadership programme strategies developed in contexts that enable effective workplace cultures and person-centred care focus on the ‘simple rules’ of living the values, focus on transformational leadership behaviours and managerial/management skills, enable learning in the workplace, foster change and quality improvement and link to organisational objectives.

The selection of fairy tales as a strategy to present the qualitative data findings and undertake “writing for a good read” came directly from an unsettling participants’ comment in the first focus group and highlighted a central point and story line:

“The Emperor’s new clothes – it’s not the course that needs changing, it’s the organisation”.

The metaphor of “The Emperor’s new clothes” was also found to be a recurrent theme in leadership research and literature. The Grimm’s Brothers fairy tale ‘The Frog Prince’ was also used as it was found to reflect the variable responses to experiential learning and practice development strategies and the transformational element.