Using Narrative Inquiry as a Research Method

An Introduction to Critical Event Narrative Analysis in Research, Teaching and Professional Practice

Patricie Mertova, Leonard Webster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429755286
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Using Narrative Inquiry as a Research Method is the ideal introduction to a growing field of study. A full and accessible guide that covers the theory and practical applications of this qualitative method, it provides researchers with a rich framework through which they can investigate the ways people experience the world depicted through their stories. Looking at how this method can effectively be applied in a range of contexts, it demonstrates the value and utility of employing narrative as a research tool in a range of teaching and learning settings.

Connecting with the broader academic debate on the value of narrative as an alternative or addition to quantitative and other qualitative methods and updated to reflect changes in the field, this book

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• explores how to use narrative inquiry and gives tested and applied examples;

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• builds on theory to consider practical applications;

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• explores the narrative cross-boundaries between research and practice; and

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• presents a selection of case studies of research on quality in higher education, internationalisation and quality in cross-cultural contexts.

Using Narrative Inquiry as a Research Method provides the ideal grounding for all students and researchers looking to learn more about narrative inquiry or use this method within their research.

1
Introduction

Why narrative?

Over the past three decades and more, narrative has gained momentum in two ways – generally, as a term occurring in educational research literature and, more specifically and recently, as a nascent research methodology in its own right with a potential for use across a wide range of disciplines (from philosophy, education, theology and psychology to economics, medicine, biology and environmental science). Narrative inquiry is set in human stories of experience. It provides researchers with a rich framework through which they can investigate the ways humans experience the world depicted through their stories. To paraphrase the French philosopher and existentialist Jean Paul Sartre from his book Words (1964),

People are always tellers of tales.

They live surrounded by their stories and

The stories of others; they see everything

That happens to them through those stories

And they try to live their lives as

If they were recounting them.

Narrative is well suited to addressing the complexities and subtleties of human experience in teaching and learning. This chapter proposes that the narrative inquiry research approach, with its ability to focus on critical life events while, at the same time, exploring holistic views, continues to hold valuable potential for researchers in a broad range of learning areas.

Narrative and human experience

Narrative has depicted experience and endeavours of humans from ancient times. Narrative records human experience through the construction and reconstruction of personal stories; it is well suited to addressing issues of complexity and cultural and human centredness because of its capacity to record and retell those events that have had the most influence on us. Such issues play a significant role in many areas of human activity.

People make sense of their lives according to the narratives available to them. Stories are constantly being restructured in the light of new events because they do not exist in a vacuum but are shaped by lifelong personal and community narratives. Narrative allows researchers to present experience holistically in all its complexity and richness. It illustrates the temporal notion of experience, recognising that one’s understanding of people and events changes.

According to Carr (1986), narrative is not associated with short-term elementary experiences and actions but pertains to longer-term or larger-scale sequences of actions, experiences and human events. He argues that action, life and historical existence are themselves structured narratively, that the concept of narrative is our way of experiencing, acting and living, both as individuals and as communities, and that narrative is our way of being and dealing with time.

Dyson and Genishi (1994) contend that we all have a basic need for story, for organising our experiences into tales of important happenings. In narratives, our voices echo those of others in the sociocultural world, and we evidence cultural membership both through our ways of crafting stories and through the very content of these stories. Narrative should not be looked upon as separate from real life but as forming meaningful connections to that life:

Stories help to make sense of, evaluate, and integrate the tensions inherent in experience: the past with the present, the fictional with the ‘real’, the official with the unofficial, personal with the professional, the canonical with the different and unexpected. Stories help us transform the present and shape the future for our students and ourselves so that it will be richer or better than the past.

(Dyson and Genishi, 1994, pp. 242–243)

This notion is also expressed by Bruner (1994), Clandinin and Connelly (2000), Sarbin (1986) and Elbaz (1991):

[L]ife as led is unseparable from a life as told… . [L]ife is not ‘how it was’ but how it is interpreted and reinterpreted, told and retold.

(Bruner, 1994; in Dyson and Genishi, 1994, p. 36)

Experience happens narratively… . Therefore, educational experience should be studied narratively.

(Clandinin and Connelly, 2000, p. 19)

[H]uman beings think, perceive, imagine, and make moral choices according to narrative structures.

(Sarbin, 1986, p. 8)

Story is the very stuff of teaching, the landscape within which we live as teachers and researchers, and within which the work of teachers can be seen as making sense.

(Elbaz, 1991, p. 3)

The interconnectedness of narrative and human experience, as indicated in these quotes, means that professional experience cannot be captured just through empirical methods, summarising this experience and issues surrounding it using statistical figures. Realising that such an approach is insufficient and restricting, this book proposes a critical event narrative inquiry method. It highlights its value and warns of its potential pitfalls.

Narrative as an alternative approach to research: contemporary research issues

By proposing narrative inquiry as an alternative research method, we are by no means attempting to dismiss the usefulness of quantitative methods. However, we believe that quantitative methods can, in many instances, be rather ineffective with regard to certain important aspects of subjects or phenomena under study. We find that they frequently tend to overlook complex issues, which are, for instance, considered significant by the participants in the research. This happens because quantitative methods tend not to have the scope to deal with complex human-centred issues. Therefore, we believe that narrative inquiry has a particular value to contribute, as it is well suited to addressing the issues of complexity and cultural and human centredness in research.

Narrative inquiry is set in human stories. According to Bell (2002), narrative inquiry rests on the assumption that we as human beings make sense of random experiences by the imposition of story structures on them. We select those elements of experience to which we will attend, and we pattern those chosen elements in ways that reflect stories available to us. Narrative is not an objective reconstruction of life – it is a rendition of how life is perceived. As such, it is based on the respondent’s life experiences and entails chosen parts of their lives.

Narrative inquiry attempts to capture the ‘whole story’, whereas other methods tend to communicate understandings of studied subjects or phenomena at certain points but frequently omit the important ‘intervening’ stages. It studies problems as forms of storytelling, involving characters with both personal and social stories. It requires going beyond the use of narrative as rhetorical structure to an analytical examination of the underlying insights and assumptions that the story illustrates. A key contribution of narrative to research resides in the manner in which it frames the study of human experience. The concept of narrative can be refined into a view that research is the construction (Jonassen, 1997) and reconstruction of personal and social stories. Moreover, the narrative can tap the social context or culture in which this construction takes place. Just as a story unfolds the complexities of characters, relationships and settings, so too can complex problems be explored in this way.

Narrative inquiry has gained momentum in practice and research in a growing number of disciplines, partly on account of the constraints of conventional research methods and their incompatibility with the complexities of human actions. However, the move towards the use of the narrative approach has also been influenced by a philosophical change of thought to a more postmodern view, with its interest in the individual and acknowledgement of the influence of experience and culture on the construction of knowledge. Narratives are also sensitive to the issues not revealed by traditional approaches.

Particular events become important parts of our life because they provide some meaningful information about who we are, and the narrative forms for representing and recounting these events provide a particular structure for understanding and conveying this meaning.

(Neisser and Fivush, 1994, p. 136)

Traditional empirical research methods have narrowed the concept of ‘validity’. They regard tests and measuring instruments as the best tools for validating research findings, operating within formal systems and focusing on empirical rigour. Narrative research, on the other hand, does not strive to produce any conclusions of certainty but aims for its findings to be ‘well grounded’ and ‘supportable’, retaining an emphasis on the linguistic reality of human experience. Narrative research does not claim to represent the exact ‘truth’ but rather aims for ‘verisimilitude’ – that the results have the appearance of truth or reality. As Karl Popper proposed, we can at best demonstrate the falsity of statements, not their truth. Thus, the conclusions of narrative research generally stay open ended (Polkinghorne, 1988).

On the issue of validity in research, Polkinghorne (1988) further points out that statistical results are often interpreted as important, without taking into account that they have probably been selected from the chance drawing of sample elements from the population. In narrative research a finding is significant if it is important. Also, in quantitative research, ‘reliability’ refers to the consistency and stability of the measuring instruments, whereas, in narrative research, attention is directed to the ‘trustworthiness’ of field notes and transcripts of the interviews.

Stories derive their convincing power not from verifiability but from verisimilitude: they will be true enough if they ring true.

(Amsterdam and Bruner, 2000, p. 30, emphasis in original)

Quantitative research is typically looking for outcomes and frequently overlooks the impact of experience, while narrative inquiry allows researchers to get an understanding of that experience.

Philosophies, worldviews and narrative

Before we become immersed in a discussion of the contributions of philosophies to research, there is a fundamentally important assumption about philosophy that should be noted. This assumption is that philosophical tradition changes slowly in comparison with technological advancement. A particular way of understanding or viewing truth and knowledge (which are philosophical phenomena) typically lasts decades and changes slowly, whereas models of teaching and learning, for instance, may change with each decade or generation, or in response to certain technological advances. Standing back and taking a broader philosophical view of research into teaching and learning may reveal approaches to research methodology that are less affected by the coming and going of technological fads, models or theories.

Philosophy offers three major dimensions: epistemology, hermeneutics and worldview. These dimensions provide a means of relating philosophical thought to educational research paradigms. Banathy (1996) described epistemology as dealing with general questions such as ‘How do we know whatever we know?’ and, perhaps more importantly, ‘What is the truth?’ With regard to educational research, the key philosophical issue is the relation between ‘learning’ as a process and ‘knowledge’ based on the truth, or what is learnt. Within educational research this issue of knowledge and truth might be viewed as the contrasting positions of the scientific understanding of truth, as maintained by Merrill (1996), and the various paradigms of human-centred understanding of truth, which is holistic and subjective (Reeves, 1996).

Hermeneutics, the art and science of interpretation, expands on the notions of epistemology and truth in providing a broader framework from which we can view the dimensions of truth as they relate to current research issues. Hermeneutics gives us the framework of modernism and postmodernism through which we can interpret ‘how we know what we know’ based on the epistemological concept of truth. Thus, taking a modernist perspective, Merrill would possibly argue that ‘how we know whatever we know’ is born of the objective, one ultimate truth. In contrast, within the framework of postmodernism, Reeves would interpret ‘how we know whatever we know’ in the light of subjective, multiple truths.

The two frameworks of modernism and postmodernism might be characterised as the major forces of philosophical thought that have influenced – and continue to influence – the changes in thinking behind teaching and learning and subsequent research methods. The concepts of truth contained in these philosophies determine the impact of the philosophies on the perception of reality. It is in this perception of reality that educational research paradigms are particularly interested.

Beyond the frameworks of modernism and postmodernism, the overarching perception of reality, which translates these philosophical perspectives into one’s view of the world and thus determines the phenomena of knowledge in each case, is described as a worldview.

Worldview, according to Henson (1992), is the perception of reality based on central assumptions, concepts and premises shared by members of a culture or subculture. Worldviews are encompassed in the stories that are told. Stories are one mechanism of revealing those views in the context of educational research. Modernism reflects one worldview, which helps explain the position advocated by traditional empirical research. Similarly, writers such as Reeves (1996), who perhaps adopt a more postmodern position, will put forward their case from their own worldview. The critical factor is that whereas the philosophies of modernism and postmodernism retain a historical identity, worldview is closely aligned with human factors in any time of human activity and experience.

Narrative across disciplines

Over the last three decades and more, interest in narrative as a general component of educational research and, more recently, a method of inquiry has grown significantly among a wide range of disciplines. The original methodological resources were provided by literary studies and sociolinguistics, and, from these resources, a number of narrative inquiry approaches have developed, underpinned by theoretical grounding in these particular disciplines. Thus, it is important to point out that there is no single narrative inquiry method but rather a number of methods grounded in individual disciplines. These individual narrative inquiry approaches are typically combined with other methodological approaches and philosophies which have been influential in that particular field of study. In considering the future applicability of narrative inquiry as a research method, the only disadvantage from a practical point of view is its dispersed and often piecemeal application. It can be argued that there is currently no readily available unifying narrative inquiry methodological approach that would assist researchers attempting to employ a narrative inquiry approach across disciplines. Thus, this book attempts to fill the gap by proposing a critical event narrative inquiry approach which is not tied with a single discipline.

Narrative research and its proponents

Identification of key players and events assists in setting the background to the rise of the popularity of narrative inquiry in contemporary research. It appears that the term narrative inquiry was first used by the Canadian researchers Connelly and Clandinin (1990) to describe an already developing approach to teacher education that focused on personal storytelling. Their work claims that what we know in education comes from telling each other stories of educational experience. So narrative inquiry is concerned with analysing and criticising the stories we tell, hear and read in the course of work. It is also concerned with the myths that surround us and are embedded in our social interactions. Often these stories are told informally. Anecdotes, gossip, documents, journal articles, presentations, media and all other texts and artefacts that we use to construct and convey meaning in our daily lives are the instruments of the storytelling process.

In Australia, for instance, a key player in narrative inquiry is Gough (1991, 1994, 19...