qualitative research methods narrative inquiry

Qualitative study design: Narrative inquiry

• Qualitative study design
• Phenomenology
• Grounded theory
• Ethnography

Narrative inquiry

• Action research
• Case Studies
• Field research
• Focus groups
• Observation
• Surveys & questionnaires
• Study Designs Home

Narrative inquiry can reveal unique perspectives and deeper understanding of a situation. Often giving voice to marginalised populations whose perspective is not often sought. 

Narrative inquiry records the experiences of an individual or small group, revealing the lived experience or particular perspective of that individual, usually primarily through interview which is then recorded and ordered into a chronological narrative. Often recorded as biography, life history or in the case of older/ancient traditional story recording - oral history.  

• Qualitative survey 
• Recordings of oral history (documents can be used as support for correlation and triangulation of information mentioned in interview.) 
• Focus groups can be used where the focus is a small group or community. 

Reveals in-depth detail of a situation or life experience.  

Can reveal historically significant issues not elsewhere recorded. 

Narrative research was considered a way to democratise the documentation and lived experience of a wider gamut of society. In the past only the rich could afford a biographer to have their life experience recorded, narrative research gave voice to marginalised people and their lived experience. 

Limitations

“The Hawthorne Effect is the tendency, particularly in social experiments, for people to modify their behaviour because they know they are being studied, and so to distort (usually unwittingly) the research findings.” SRMO  

The researcher must be heavily embedded in the topic with a broad understanding of the subject’s life experience in order to effectively and realistically represent the subject’s life experience. 

There is a lot of data to be worked through making this a time-consuming method beyond even the interview process itself. 

Subject’s will focus on their lived experience and not comment on the greater social movements at work at the time. For example, how the Global Financial Crisis affected their lives, not what caused the Global Financial Crisis. 

This research method relies heavily on the memory of the subject. Therefore, triangulation of the information is recommended such as asking the question in a different way, at a later date, looking for correlating documentation or interviewing similarly related participants. 

Example questions

• What is the lived experience of a home carer for a terminal cancer patient? 
• What is it like for parents to have their children die young? 
• What was the role of the nurse in Australian hospitals in the 1960s? 
• What is it like to live with cerebral palsy? 
• What are the difficulties of living in a wheelchair? 

Example studies

• Francis, M. (2018). A Narrative Inquiry Into the Experience of Being a Victim of Gun Violence. Journal of Trauma Nursing, 25(6), 381–388. https://doi-org.ezproxy-f.deakin.edu.au/10.1097/JTN.0000000000000406 
•  Kean, B., Oprescu, F., Gray, M., & Burkett, B. (2018). Commitment to physical activity and health: A case study of a paralympic gold medallist. Disability and Rehabilitation, 40(17), 2093-2097. doi:10.1080/09638288.2017.1323234  https://doi-org.ezproxy-f.deakin.edu.au/10.1080/09638288.2017.1323234
• Liamputtong, P. (2009). Qualitative research methods. Oxford University Press. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.deakin.edu.au/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat00097a&AN=deakin.b2351301&site=eds-live   
• Padgett, D. (2012). Qualitative and mixed methods in public health. SAGE. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.deakin.edu.au/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat00097a&AN=deakin.b3657335&authtype=sso&custid=deakin&site=eds-live&scope=site  
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• Next: Action research >>
• Last Updated: Mar 19, 2024 9:32 AM
• URL: https://deakin.libguides.com/qualitative-study-designs

Qualitative Research Methods

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• Qualitative Methods Overview
• Phenomenology
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Narrative Inquiry

• Oral History
• Feminist Approaches
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Narrative inquiry uses stories to understand social patterns.  Stories from the participants and stories created by researchers from information they gather from participants are at the heart of narrative inquiry.  Life history and biography research is sometimes categorized as narrative inquiry.  

Books and eBooks

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Qualitative Inquiry: Thematic, Narrative and Arts-Based Perspectives

• Edition: Second Edition
• By: Lynn Butler-Kisber
• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Publication year: 2018
• Online pub date: March 22, 2019
• Discipline: Education
• Methods: Case study research , Narrative research , Constant comparison
• DOI: https:// doi. org/10.4135/9781526417978
• Keywords: art , films , inquiry , knowledge , literacy , poetry , teaching Show all Show less
• Print ISBN: 9781473966918
• Online ISBN: 9781526485632
• Buy the book icon link

Subject index

Qualitative inquiry is not merely a research method or a series of analytic steps, but a holistic process that challenges the age-old qualitative/quantitative dichotomy. This book provides students and researchers with an approachable guide to a range of interpretive perspectives, including thematic, narrative, and arts-based types of inquiry. Fully revised and updated, the new Second Edition features:  • A brand new introduction firmly placing qualitative inquiry in context  • New further reading sections to guide you deeper into the relevant literature  • Expanded sections on auto-ethnography and technology  • A range of examples to demonstrate the application of research techniques Presenting a clear overview of the theory, method and interpretation involved in qualitative inquiry, this book is the ideal starting point for those engaging in arts-based qualitative research.

Front Matter

• Introduction
• Chapter 1 | Introduction to Qualitative Inquiry
• Chapter 2 | Getting Started in Qualitative Inquiry
• Chapter 3 | Constant Comparison Inquiry
• Chapter 4 | Phenomenological Inquiry
• Chapter 5 | Narrative Inquiry
• Chapter 6 | Poetic Inquiry
• Chapter 7 | Visual Inquiry
• Chapter 8 | Performative Inquiry
• Chapter 9 | Concluding Thoughts

Back Matter

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11 Practicing Narrative Inquiry

Arthur P. Bochner is Distinguished University Professor of Communication and a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association. He is the co-author of Understanding Family Communication (Allyn and Bacon), co-editor (with Carolyn Ellis) of Composing Ethnography (AltaMira), Ethnographically Speaking (AltaMira), and the Left Coast Press book series, Writing Lives: Ethnographic Narratives. He has published more than 100 articles and monographs on close relationships, communication theory, and narrative. His current research focuses on memory, narrative, and identity. In 2014, Left Coast Press will publish his academic autoethnography, Coming to Narrative: Method and Meaning in a University Life.

Nicholas A Riggs is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida. His research focuses on narrative, autoethnography, and digital technology as a universe of dialogic modes of interpretive practice and relationship development. His dialogic essay, "Following Bud: Blogging at the End-of-Life," will be published in Qualitative Inquiry in 2013. He is currently conducting ethnographic dissertation research in which he is focusing on the intersections of relational, cultural, and performative dimensions of communication in the evolution of a university student-based improv performance community.

• Published: 01 July 2014
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This chapter focuses on the intellectual, philosophical, empirical, and pragmatic development of the turn toward narrative, tracing the rise of narrative inquiry as it evolved in the aftermath of the crisis of representation in the social sciences. Narrative inquiry seeks to humanize the human sciences, placing people, meaning and personal identity at the center, inviting the development of reflexive, relational, and interpretive methodologies and drawing attention not only on the actual but also to the possible and the good. The chapter synthesizes the changing methodological and ethical orientations of qualitative researchers associated with narrative inquiry; explores the divergent standpoints of small- story and big- story researchers, draws attention to the differences between narrative analysis and narratives-under-analysis; and reveals narrative practices that seek to help people form better relationships, overcome oppressive canonical identities, amplify or reclaim moral agency, and cope better with contingencies and difficulties experienced over the course of life.

We grasp our lives in a narrative . In order to have a sense of who we are, we have to have a notion of how we have become, and of where we are going. – Charles Taylor (1989)

We tell stories because that’s what we have to do. It’s what we’re all about. We care for one another with the stories we place in each other’s memory; they are our food for thought, and life. – Richard Zaner (2004)

People are constantly telling stories. We tell stories to ourselves and stories to others; stories about ourselves and stories about other selves. Apparently, self-telling is a human preoccupation. We assume there is something akin to a “self” to tell stories to or about. As we tell stories about others, we construct images or meanings of them and their actions, categorizing or classifying them—in a sense, making them up ( Hacking, 1999 ). The same can be said about the stories we tell about ourselves. On this view, one’s self—my-self or your-self—can be understood as a telling ( Schafer, 1980 ) and a consequence of “relational being” ( Gergen, 2009 ). As a result, the idea of a unified, fixed, and singular self ontologically prior to and apart from a person’s living experience is replaced by the notion of a multiple, fluid, and negotiated identity that is continuously under narrative construction—a process that is never complete as long as we live and interact with others.

Moreover, telling stories is one of the primary ways we “reckon with time” ( Ricoeur, 1981 , p. 169). We are historical beings who live in the present, under the weight of the past and the uncertainty of the future. Our language alerts us to a consciousness of there and then, here and now, and sooner or later. We are called on to make sense of and remember the past in order to move ahead and attend to the future. Thus, time, memory, and narrative are inextricably linked.

A newborn baby is devoid of story. Still, each of us is born into a world of stories and storytellers, ready to be shaped and fashioned by the narratives to which we will be exposed. Whether we like it or not, our lives are rooted in narratives and narrative practices. We depend on stories almost as much as we depend on the air we breathe. Air keeps us alive; stories give meaning to our lives. They become our equipment for living. As Myerhoff (2007 , p. 18) observed, “It is almost as if we are born with an inconclusion and until we fill that gap with story, we are not entirely sure, not only what our lives mean, not only what secrets require our attention, but that we are there at all.”

When we are children, we soak up cautionary tales that shape and guide us. We are exposed to fairy tales and tall tales, ballads and legends, myths and fables, epics and folklore. From The Arabian Nights to Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Aesop’s Fables, Uncle Remus stories (see Joel Chandler Harris, 1881 ) and beyond, the plots and moral precepts of the human dramas into which we have been born are transmitted to us in stories. Along the storied highway of life, we meet monsters and heroes, fantastic creatures with extraordinary, magical powers, saints and evil-doers, beauties and beasts. Over and over again, we hear, “Once upon a time,” “Happily ever after,” and “The moral of the story....” Gradually, we accumulate a reserve of stories to which we can appeal when the occasion calls for it. If we get in trouble, we may even summon a story to save our skin.

As students and as family members, we read, write, and listen to stories, learning to compare and analyze them. The stories to which we are exposed tell us who we are; where and how we are located in ethnic, family, and cultural history; where we have come from, where we may be going, and with whom. Passed to us by our elders and significant others, these stories become our narrative inheritance ( Goodall, 2005 ). In the grip of stories, we absorb the lore of the past and find expression for codifying our dreams about the future. We watch the characters in these stories work through the dramatic plots and troubles of a lifetime. We learn to feel and identify with some, but not all, of the characters. The plots of these stories introduce us to good and evil, love and hate, heaven and hell, right and wrong, birth and death, war and peace, suffering and healing, and a wide swath between the extremes. Throughout our lives, we are coached to keep some stories private and to guard these secret stories as if our lives depended on protecting and keeping them safely out of sight or earshot.

In the meantime, we find we must move on, living out and through our storied existence. Sometimes, we find ourselves in stories we would rather not be living. Often, we re-story our lives, revising the meaning of the tales in which we have been immersed, constructing new storylines to help us exert control over life’s possibilities, ambiguities, and limitations. In some of our stories, we claim ourselves as heroes; in others, we are dreamers; in still others, we are traumatized victims or survivors. Other people in our lives are characters in our stories, and we are characters in theirs ( Bochner, 2002 ; Parry, 1991 ). A storied life is a negotiated life collaboratively enacted and performed in dialogue with the other characters with whom we are connected. Thus, the stories we live out are a relational, co-authored production. As Arthur Frank (1997 , p. 43) says, “Stories are the ongoing work of turning mere existence into a life that is social, and moral, and affirms the existence of the teller as a human being.” It turns out that the stories we tell are not only about our lives; they are part of our lives ( Rosenwald & Ochberg, 1992 ).

The philosopher Heidegger (1889–1976) construed humans as “beings whose lives are at issue or in question ” ( Richardson, Fowers, & Guignon, 1999 , p. 220). Similarly, Ricoeur (1985 , p. 263) wrote that “On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise.” In other words, we are self- and other-interpreting animals for whom being is constituted in and by questions about what is important, good, or meaningful. To be a person, I am compelled to ask what kind of life is worth living and to measure the meaningfulness of my life against some version of the good acceptable to me, which requires a narrative understanding—“a sense of what I have become which can only be given in a story” ( Taylor, 1989 , p. 48).

Thus, the human condition is largely a narrative condition. Storytelling is the means by which we represent our experiences to ourselves and to others; it is how we communicate and make sense of our lives; it is how we fill our lives with meaning. To study persons is to study beings existing in narrative and socially constituted by stories. From bedtime stories to life reviews—across the span of our lives—we listen to stories and tell stories of our own. Myerhoff (2007 , p. 18) called this passionate craving for story a “narrative urge,” while Fisher marked it as an Archimedean point signified by the phrase Homo narrans ( Fisher, 1984 , 1987 ).

The Rise of Narrative Inquiry in the Social Sciences

It seems as if a lot of people have been waking up after a long and strange slumber, asking: Why don’t we study people? Mark Freeman (1998 , p. 27)

It took a long time for the social sciences to come to narrative ( Bochner, 2014 ). Not until 1982, when Donald Spence published Narrative Truth and Historical Truth , a book that challenged one of the foundational premises of psychoanalysis, did psychology begin to show a concerted effort to understand how individuals are shaped and changed by the stories in which they live and act ( Josselson and Lieblich, 1997 ). Spence (1982) argued that psychoanalysis was not akin to an archaeological excavation of a person’s historical past, as Freud (1914) had argued, but rather involved a collaborative construction of a coherent and credible story shaped out of bits and pieces of disclosed memories, imagination, and associations. It wasn’t the events themselves, but the meanings attributed to events, that shaped a person, and these meanings could be reframed and reshaped into a story that gave new hope and promise to a despondent individual plagued by doubt, despair, and/or dejection.

Four years later, Theodore Sarbin (1986) published Narrative Psychology , an edited collection of essays and research monographs that focused on “the storied nature of human conduct.” Reacting to “the epistemological crisis in social psychology,” Sarbin (1986 , p. vii) offered narrative psychology as “a viable alternative to the positivist paradigm” of psychological research, one which could pull psychology out of its state of disillusionment by replacing the mechanistic and reductionist postulates of positivism with a humanistic paradigm highlighting story making, storytelling and story comprehension ( Sarbin, 1986 ). Sarbin’s conviction that narrative could serve as a root metaphor for a revitalized social psychology grew out of conversations in 1979 with three of the most profoundly influential narrative theorists—historians Louis Mink (1970) and Hayden White (1975 , 1980 ) and the narrative theologian Stephen Crites (1971) —while he was a visitor at the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University. Although Mink and White were deeply skeptical of narrative’s capacity to represent real events—“stories are not lived but told” ( Mink, 1970 , p. 557)— both affirmed narrative’s constitutive role in history’s search for and claim to knowledge, as well its formidable power to provide a framework that can make the past intelligible. In Crites’ (1971) manifesto on narrative, he resisted the temptation to view narrative as merely one way to organize and make sense of experience, arguing instead that everything experienced is experienced narratively—human life is storied life all the way down and back. Acknowledging the significance of time and memory, Crites (1971) argued that human consciousness takes an inherently narrative form.

Prior to the publication of the books authored by Spence (1982) and Sarbin (1986) , the term “narrative” had no recognizable status in psychology either as a methodological orientation or as a topic of research in the study of personal, interpersonal, or therapeutic relationships. By 1992, however, Krieswirth (1992) felt it necessary to account for what he called “the narrative turn” in the human sciences. Not only was psychology turning toward narrative but so were economics ( McCloskey, 1990 ), law ( Farber & Sherry, 1993 ), education ( Connelly & Clandinen, 1990 ), history ( Mink, Fay, Golob, & Vann, 1987 ; White, 1987 ), psychoanalysis ( Coles, 1989 ; Schafer, 1980 ; Spence, 1982 ), psychotherapy ( White & Epston, 1990 ), sociology ( Richardson, 1990 ), and ethnography ( Turner & Bruner, 1986 ).

Between 1986 and 1994, Bruner published his essay on “life as narrative” ( Bruner, 1987 ) and his books on “possible worlds” (1986) and “acts of meaning” ( Bruner, 1990 ); Polkinghorne (1988) urged a fuller appreciation of the realm of meaning, and hence narrative, as a core concern for all the human sciences; McAdams (1985) defined identity as a psychosocial problem of arriving at a coherent life story; Rosenwald and Ochberg (1992) introduced a critical-cultural perspective for investigating the stories people tell about their lives; Mair (1989) made the case for a narratively grounded “poetics of experience”; Parry (1991) , Schafer (1992) , and White and Epston (1990) proposed a framework for narratively based therapies; Shotter and Gergen (1989) edited a collection of essays that examined the narrative textuality of the self; Richardson (1990) argued for a sociology that narrated lives instead of abstracting forces; Ellis and Bochner (1992) developed the methodology of co-constructed personal narratives and promoted the idea of performed autobiographical research stories that would give audiences the kind of experiential, emotional immediacy lacking in traditional forms of research; Tedlock (1991) and E. Bruner (1986) described the emergence of narrative ethnography; Langellier (1989) gave credibility to the study of personal narratives as a means of validating the voices of marginal and silenced individuals and groups; Connelly and Clandinin (1990) underscored the ways in which educational research can be viewed as stories on several levels; Coles (1989) called for more stories and less theory in order to open up the moral imagination of teachers, researchers, and psychiatrists; Josselson and Lieblich (1993) initiated an annual publication focused on the study of life narrative in psychology that would call attention to people telling their own stories about what had been significant in their lives; and Freeman (1993) drew attention to the neglect of and importance for the autobiographical subject and memoir in psychology. Krieswirth (1992 , p. 629) pointed out what had by then become obvious: “As anyone aware of the current intellectual scene has probably noticed, there has recently been a virtual explosion of interest in narrative and in theorizing about narrative.”

As the end of the twentieth century approached, the narrative turn accelerated and intensified. In particular, personal narratives ( Clandinin & Connelly, 1994 ; Ellis & Bochner, 2000 ; Langellier, 1999 ), life histories ( Freeman, 1993 ; Tierney, 2000 ), life stories ( McAdams, 1993 ), testimonios ( Beverley, 2000 ), poeticized bodies ( Pelias, 1999 ), and memoirs ( Couser, 1997 ; Freeman, 1993 ; Miller, 2000 ) became widely viewed as significant materials and methods for conducting inquiry, as well as major topics of research across the human sciences (see e.g., Church, 1995 ; Denzin 1997 ; Ellis & Bochner, 1996 ; Gubrium & Holstein, 1997 ; Plummer, 2001 ). By the turn of the century, Denzin and Lincoln (2000 , p. 3) could conclude, “Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, the narrative turn has been taken.”

Why Narrative?

In the 1990s, narrative inquiry became a rallying point for those of us who believed that the human sciences needed to become more human. To some extent, the burst of enthusiasm for personal narrative and the study of lives ( Josselson & Lieblich, 1993 ) was a response to the questionable ethics and doubtful appropriateness of standard methodological practices in the social sciences ( Apter, 1996 ). In the human sciences, we are supposed to be studying people, observing their lived experiences, and trying to understand their lives, and narratives come closer to representing the contexts and integrity of those lives than do questionnaires and graphs ( Freeman, 1997 , 1998 a ). Thus, the narrative turn is widely viewed as an expression of dissatisfaction with received views of knowledge, in particular a rejection of positivist and postpositivist social science. But the enthusiasm for narrative inquiry was sparked as much by existential, ontological, and moral concerns as by a methodological change of heart. Narrative is as much about the possible as it is about the actual. Many of those drawn to narrative inquiry wanted to imagine, discover, or create new and better ways of living. As Freeman (1998 a , p. 46) said, “We need to understand lives and indeed to live lives differently if we are to avoid further fragmentation, isolation, and disconnection from each other.”

Now, nearly a full generation later, we can say confidently that the turn toward narrative in the social sciences is not a passing fancy. Nor is it a movement confined to a small group of disgruntled, renegade, eccentric, self-indulgent, and/or alienated individuals, as Atkinson (1997) argued (see e.g., Bochner, 2001 ; Sparkes, 2001 , for responses to Atkinson’s arguments). On the contrary, the inspiration for the narrative turn penetrates deep into the conscience of those who embrace it. To comprehend the sources of this inspiration, one must understand the demographic, intellectual, social, and cultural conditions under which the most recent generations of researchers and graduate students in the social sciences have been educated. They have been exposed to a far different conception of how and for what purposes knowledge is produced than academics entering the social sciences prior to the 1990s.

Turning away from the Correspondence Theory of Knowledge

A turn toward something can be seen as a turn away from something else. To understand the context in which researchers in the human sciences began to turn toward narrative, it is helpful to consider how the postmodernism and poststructuralism of the time was challenging some of the most venerable notions about scientific knowledge and truth.

Early in the 1960s, Kuhn (1962) used the history of science to show that the building-block model of science lacked foundations. According to Kuhn (1962) , scientific revolutions were more akin to conversions—from one paradigm to another—than to discoveries. Taking up where Kuhn left off, Rorty (1979 , 1982 ), Toulmin (1969) , Feyerabend (1975) , and Sellars (1963) illustrated how the “facts” scientists see are inextricably connected to the vocabulary they use to represent them. At about the same time, Lyotard (1984) debunked the belief in a unified totality of knowledge, questioning whether master narratives (or general theories) were either possible or desirable; Barthes (1977) , Derrida (1978 , 1981 ), and Foucault (1970) effectively obliterated the modernist conception of the author, altering how we understand the connections among authors, texts, and readers/audiences; Bakhtin (1981) broadened the interpretive space available to the reader of a social science text by encouraging multiple perspectives, unsettled meanings, plural voices, and local knowledge that transgresses claims to a unitary body of theory; feminist critical theorists such as Harding (1991) , Clough (1994) , Harstock (1983) , and Smith (1990 , 1992 ) promoted the unique and marginalized standpoints and particularities of women; and multicultural textualists such as Trinh (1989 , 1992 ), Anzaldúa (1987) , and Behar (1993 , 1996 ) exposed how the complexities of race, class, sexuality, disability, and ethnicity are woven into the fabric of concrete, personal lived experiences.

By the mid-1980s, the social sciences were experiencing “a crisis of representation” casting a shadow of doubt on the validity and efficacy of the theory of language on which orthodox approaches to scientific knowledge were based ( Clifford, 1988 ; Clifford & Marcus, 1986 ; Geertz, 1988 ; Marcus & Fisher, 1986 ; Turner & Bruner, 1986 ). This “correspondence theory of knowledge” hinged on the assumption that language can achieve the denotative and referential function of describing objects in a world out there , apart from and independent of language users ( Bochner & Waugh, 1995 ; Rorty, 1967 , 1982 , 1989 ). To hold to this assumption was to grant that the words used in scientific descriptions do not specify a world, but rather represent the world, and that words can denote what is out there in the world apart from, or prior to, the interpretations (or descriptions) of researchers who use them.

Beginning with Kuhn (1962) , however, the history and philosophy of science showed that we should understand language not as simply a tool for mirroring what is describable about reality, but rather as an ongoing and constitutive quality of reality ( Bochner & Waugh, 1995 ). What it is possible to say about the world involves the indistinguishable provocations of the world and the interventions of language by which we make claims about that world. In short, the world we social scientists seek to describe does not exist in the form of the sentences we write when we theorize about it ( Rorty, 1989 ).

Thus, the cultural context of social science research that launched the turn toward narrative was one in which some of the most venerable notions about scientific truth and knowledge were being contested ( Denzin, 1997 ; Lyotard, 1984 ). The traditional ideas of an objectively accessible reality and a scientific method turned out to be, in Richard Rorty’s (1982 , p. 195) words, “neither clear nor useful.” What was needed, argued Rorty (1982 , p. 195), was an approach to social science “which emphasizes the utility of narratives and vocabularies rather than the objectivity of laws and theories.” Sensing that this was one of those rare “experimental moments” (Marcus & Fisher, 1999) akin to a Kuhnian paradigm clash (Kuhn, 1970), advocates of a meaning-centered, interpretive, and qualitative social science rapidly began to introduce new models and methodologies applicable to a paradigm of narrative inquiry ( Spector-Mersel, 2010 ), such as systematic sociological introspection ( Ellis, 1991 ), biographical method ( Denzin, 1991 ), personal experience methods ( Clandinin & Connelly, 1994 ), feminist methods ( Reinharz, 1992 ), consciousness-raising methods ( Hollway, 1989 ), co-constructed narrative ( Bochner & Ellis, 1992 ), and interactive interviewing ( Ellis, Kiesinger, & Tillmann-Healy, 1997 ), and to propose new subfields of inquiry sympathetic to the shift toward more personal, emotional, and story-based forms of inquiry such as personal sociology ( Higgins & Johnson, 1988 ), autobiographical sociology ( Friedman, 1990 ), private sociology ( Shostak, 1996 ), emotional sociology ( Ellis, 1991 ), indigenous anthropology ( Tedlock, 1991 ), autoanthropolgy ( Strathern, 1997 ), anthropology of the self ( Kondo, 1990 ), anthropology at home ( Jackson, 1987 ), anthropological poetics ( Brady, 1991 ), autoethnography ( Ellis & Bochner, 1996 ; Bochner & Ellis, 2002 ), and autoethnographic performance ( Park-Fuller, 1998 ).

Disputing the capacity of language and speech to mirror experience ( Rorty, 1979 ), postmodernists revealed that there was no access to the world unmediated by language. No methods exist that can warrant a claim to describe reality as reality would describe herself if she could talk ( Rorty, 1982 ). Because the world can’t speak for itself, all attempts to represent the world involve transforming a speechless reality into a discursive form that makes sense. To the extent that descriptions of the social world thus involve translating “knowing” into “telling,” they may be viewed as narratives ( White, 1980 ). Thus, all social science writing is a narrative production saturated by gaps between experience and its expression.

Representing social reality accurately in language is a problem because the constitutive quality of language creates experience and necessarily transforms any data it describes. If language is not simply a tool for mirroring reality, but is rather an ongoing and constitutive part of reality, then our research agenda needs to take into account how, as social scientists, we are part of the world we investigate and the ways we use language to make and change it. Accordingly, our focus becomes showing how meaning is performed and negotiated by and between speakers (research participants) and interpreters (researchers) ( Bochner & Waugh, 1995 ), a distinctively narrative project ( Bruner, 1990 ).

In a succession of handbook articles dealing with perspectives on inquiry, Bochner (1984 , 1994 , 2002 ) argued that the legitimation of this sort of meaning-centered, narrative inquiry is contingent on breaking free of certain disciplinary norms pervasive across the human sciences that idealize the significance of abstractions over details, stability over change, and graphs over stories. The problem, he reasoned, is not with science per se, but with a reverent and idealized view of science that positions science above the contingencies of language and outside the circle of historical and cultural interests ( Bochner, 2002 ; Bochner & Waugh, 1995 ). Although academic disciplines that have been deeply entrenched in the correspondence theory of knowledge, such as mainstream psychology, sociology, and communication studies, have been slow to respond to the challenges posed by the crisis of representation, a new generation of social and human scientists who understand language as a means of dealing with the world have responded by opening new vistas of inquiry, experimenting with new research practices, and turning increasingly toward narrative, interpretive, autoethnographic, performative, and other qualitative approaches to inquiry that emphasize ways in which research in the human sciences is a relational, political, performative, and moral endeavor that puts human meanings and values into motion ( Bochner, 2002 , 2012 ; Bochner & Ellis, 2002 ; Chase, 2011 ; Denzin, 1997 ; Denzin & Lincoln, 2000 , 2005 , 2011 ; Ellis, 1995 , 2004 ; Ellis & Bochner, 1996 , 2000 ; Geertz, 1995 ; Gergen & Gergen, 2000 , 2012 ).

Changing Demographics: Evolution of a New Academic Culture of Inquiry

Students entering graduate schools in the 1990s thus began their lives as researchers and scholars under a cloud of epistemological doubt. During this period, a dramatic shift took place in the demographic composition of the graduate student population. There was a rapid increase in the enrollment of women, middle- and lower-class people, blacks and Hispanics, and students from Third- and Fourth-World countries ( Geertz, 1995 ). Gradually, these demographic changes led to a globalization of the curriculum and courses that stressed a greater appreciation for divergent rationalities grounded in cultural, racial, ethnic, gender, and class diversity ( Shweder, 1991 ). Prepared by their lived histories to understand how a vocabulary of neutrality, objectivity, and scientific detachment could easily function as a tool of oppression and domination, these newcomers hungered for a research agenda that resonated with their lives and lived experiences. In the aftermath of postmodernism, they were reluctant to view the task of producing knowledge and representing reality as unproblematic. They understood research as a social process, as much a product of interaction as of observation, and one inextricably bound to the embodied experiences and participation of the investigating self. Already inspired to question conventionality, power, and a monolithic view of research practices, and now reinforced by sustained critiques of orthodox writing practices, institutionalized knowledge production, and the crisis of representation, they were eager to locate engaging, creative, and useful alternatives to the existing models of research. Inevitably, they were drawn toward a radical democratization of the research process—an intention to minimize the power differential between researchers and participants (subjects)—one that placed a greater emphasis on activism, social justice, and applied research ( Denzin & Lincoln, 2001 , 2004 ; Tedlock, 1991 ). Ultimately, a new research vocabulary evolved that emphasized terms such as autoethnography ( Ellis & Bochner, 2000 ; Holman Jones, 2005 ; Holman Jones, Adams, & Ellis, 2013 ; Spry, 2011 ); performance ethnography ( Alexander, 2005 ; Denzin, 2003 ); investigative poetry ( Hartnett & Engles, 2005 ); co-constructed narrative and collaborative autoethnography ( Bochner & Ellis, 1992 , 1995 ; Ellis & Bochner, 1992 ; Ellis & Rawicki, 2013 ), appreciative and action research ( Greenwood & Levin, 2005 ), feminist praxis ( Dillard & Okpalaoka, 2011 ), transformative research for social justice ( Mertens, Sullivan, & Stace, 2011 ), performance, and lived experience—each rooted in some extent to a turn toward narrative.

In retrospect, then, the turn toward narrative inquiry and qualitative research in the human sciences appears to have been a consequence of intellectual, social, and cultural changes—most notably the crisis in representation; greater access to previously marginalized minority populations who, in turn, championed the need to give voice to silenced narratives and marginalized groups and communities; and a growing commitment to use research to make a difference personally, emotionally, politically, and culturally. Initially reactive, the turn toward narrative became proactive. Social scientists drawn to narrative inquiry now are pursuing constructive responses to the agitating critiques of realism, modernism, and the correspondence theory of language. On the whole, they view these critiques not as an end but as a beginning, not as a reason for despair but as a cause for hope, not as a curtain closing on the excesses and illusions of the past, but as a door opening to a future that is ripe with possibilities and promise. As Gergen (1999) advised, we should be careful not to undermine the critical impulse, but, at the same time, we should be inspired by what we have learned from these critiques to emphasize the creation of alternatives. If language is the medium of expression we use to create our reality, then we need to investigate what we can do with language to create the kind of realities in which we want to live.

In light of the cultural, philosophical, and epistemic context in which the turn toward narrative inquiry originated—the desire for a more human- and justice-focused social science and the rejection of the correspondence theory of truth—researchers championing an interpretive and narrative orientation for the human sciences substantially altered how they understood and construed the research process, particularly their relational, ethical, and procedural obligations to the people they studied. Although not all narrative inquiry in the human sciences embodies this understanding of the research process, many of those who took the turn toward narrative and turned away from realist, positivist, and modernist social science subscribe to the ideal of a reflexive, relational, dialogic, and collaborative process grounded in the following eight precepts of distinctively interpretive social science:

The researcher is part of the research data.

A social science text always is composed by a particular somebody someplace; writing and/or performing research is part of the inquiry.

Research involves the emotionality and subjectivity of both researchers and participants.

The relationship between researchers and research participants should be democratic.

Researchers ought to accept an ethical obligation to give something important back to the people they study and write about.

What researchers write should be written for participants as much as about them, researchers and participants should be accountable to each other, the researcher’s voice should not dominate the voices of participants.

Research should be about what could be (not just about what has been).

The reader or audience should be conceived as a co-participant, not as a spectator, and should be given opportunities to think with (not just about) the research story (or findings).

Thus, the goals of much of narrative inquiry are to keep conversation going (about matters crucial to living well); to activate subjectivity, feeling, and identification in readers or listeners; to raise consciousness; to promote empathy and social justice; and to encourage activism—in short, to show what it can mean to live a good life and create a just society.

Definitions, Assumptions, and Goals

Due to the immense breadth and volume of work on narrative across the human sciences, the focus of this chapter must be selective. Given the space limitations of a single chapter, we could not possibly do justice to the wide range of historical, critical, cultural, philosophical, literary, rhetorical, cinematic, feminist, psychoanalytic, therapeutic, developmental, discursive, and linguistic studies of narrative, or to the huge corpus of significant works on storytelling within the fields of folklore and oral traditions. Thus, we have chosen to move away from the predominantly textual, structural, and semiotic concerns of those who focus primarily on narrative production (most notably literary, discursive, and/or linguistic works classified under the rubric narratology , where narrative is an end in itself) and toward a focus on storytelling as a communicative activity , where the emphasis is on how humans use language to endow experience with meanings. Consequently, we will emphasize the “narrative fabric of the self,” what psychologist Mark Freeman (1998 a , p. 461) has called “the poetic dimension of narrative,” reflecting each person’s struggle to make language adequate to experience, including the experience of one’s self.

Many scholars and practitioners of narrative across the human sciences are deeply immersed in and intrigued by what is called the “narrative identity thesis”—the question of how stories shape and can reshape a person’s identity. Narrative identity research focuses on the stories people tell about themselves either in mundane, everyday interactions— small stories —or in retrospective accounts ranging from episodic stories about epiphanies or personal troubles to full-blown life histories— big stories . Researchers seek to understand how people look back on their lives and how they have coped in the past with the contingencies, difficulties, and challenges of lived experience, as well as how their identities are made communicatively, through everyday interactions with others. These stories may be told within the context of a particular relationship, such as first-person accounts of a friendship or marriage; outside the relationship in the context of a research interview, conversation or dialogue; or as part of a researcher’s extended participation in a community. Although Strawson’s (2004) depiction of the narrative identity thesis as an intellectual fashion and more likely “an affliction... than a prerequisite for a good life” (p. 50) has stirred considerable attention in recent years, we concur with Battersby’s (2006) assessment that Strawson’s argument is riddled with unsupported assertions, poorly defined and imprecise concepts, and the lack of an alternative perspective on the relationship between self and narrative, and with Eakin’s (2008) observation that “we are embedded in a narrative identity system whether we like it or not” (p. 16). Thus, in light of the space available to us in this chapter, we are not inclined to give attention to this particular assault on the narrative identity thesis. Still, Strawson (2004) has contributed some fresh questions for debate and discussion. Readers interested in a detailed dialogue with the anti-narrative identity thesis should consult the collection of essays edited by Hutto (2007) .

In this chapter, we assume that stories are social performances at least insofar as they involve a teller and an audience—the husband or wife, the friend, the partner, the administrator, the survivor, the researcher, and the like. Normally, the stories people tell follow certain conventions of storytelling; that is, most stories contain similar elements and follow similar patterns of development. These include:

People depicted as characters in the story

A scene, place , or context in which the story occurs

An epiphany or crisis of some sort that provides dramatic tension , around which the emplotted events depicted in the story revolve and toward which a resolution and/or explanation is pointed

A temporal ordering of events

A point or moral to the story that provides an explanation and gives meaning and value to the experiences depicted

Storytellers portray the people in their stories, including themselves, as characters: protagonists, antagonists, heroes, victim, or survivors. Usually, the stories they tell revolve around an epiphany or dramatic event. The events take place somewhere, sometime—in a scene that can provide context and give setting, framing, and texturing to the story. The point or goal of the story is to come to terms with, explain, or understand the event(s): Why did this happen to me? How can I understand what these experiences mean? What lessons have I learned? How have I been changed?

The events depicted in a story occur over time. Most—although by no means all—personal stories are told in an order that follows linear, chronological time, giving the sense of a beginning, middle, and ending. The endpoint is particularly important not only because it represents the goal toward which the events or actions are pointed, and thus gives the story its capacity for drama and closure, but also because it is imbued with value—there is a moral to the story. “Could we ever narrativize without moralizing?” asks Hayden White (1980 , p. 27), a question answered by MacIntyre’s (1981 , p. 456) insistence that: “Narrative requires an evaluative framework in which good and bad character helps to produce unfortunate or happy outcomes.”

When people tell stories, they interpret and give meaning to the experiences depicted in their stories. The act of telling is always a performance, a process of interpretation and communication in which the teller and listener collaborate in sense-making. After all, meaning does not exist independent of or prior to the interpretation of experience. In other words, experience is not the same as story. Indeed, the burden of the academic storyteller is to find the story in the experience ( Stone, 1988 ) and to try to make it the experience of those who listen to the story. Storytelling attaches meanings to experiences. In the process of interpreting experiences through storytelling, people activate subjectivity, emotionality, and available frames of narrative intelligibility. Once told, the storied experiences become constitutive of the storyteller’s life. The story not only depicts life, it also shapes it reflexively . Stories are in a continual process of production, open to editing, revision, and transformation ( Ellis, 2009 ). As Rosenwald (1992 , p. 275) observed, “Not only does the past live in the present, but it also appears different at every new turn we take.”

Narratives lived, told, and anticipated occur in a cultural context and are influenced by canonical stories circulating in everyday life. Often, the frames of intelligibility that function as narrative resources are canonical and cultural stories. But people are not condemned to live out the stories passed on through cultural productions such as cinema, television, music, and other forms of popular communication or through traditions passed on and/or promoted by cultural institutions such as families, schools, synagogues, or churches. If our stories never thwarted or contested received and canonical ones, we would have no expectation of change, no account of conflict, no demand to account for our actions, and no sense of agency. Evidently, humans have a dazzling capacity to reform or reframe the meanings of their actions through stories. As Rosenwald (1992) points out, there is always an uncomfortable tension between restless desire and stabilizing conventions.

In narrative inquiry, researchers must stay wary of the temptation to treat the stories people tell as “maps,” “mirrors,” or “reflections” of the experiences they depict. Instead, stories should be recognized as fluid, co-constructed, meaning-centered reproductions and performances of experience achieved in the context of relationships and subject to negotiable frames of intelligibility and the desire for continuity and coherence over time. Usually, storytellers have options and alternatives ( Carr, 1986 ). Over the course of our lives, we reframe, revise, remake, retell, and relive our stories ( Ellis, 2009 ).

Often, narrative inquiry functions as a mode of research that invites readers to think with stories ( Frank, 1995 ). Readers are invited to enter into dialogue with narratives that depict the difficult choices about how to act that we all face over the course of our lives and to contemplate the possibilities and limitations we encounter when we attempt to become authors of our own stories.

Stretching What We Mean by Stories

The question, “what is a story?” has been talked about endlessly ( Myerhoff, 2007 ). Most narrativists insist on beginnings, middles, and endings, but LeGuin (1989) extends the definition of a story by pointing to a runic inscription, translated as “Tolfink was here,” carved into a stone located in a twelfth-century church in Wales. In the spirit of Primo Levi (1989) and Virginia Woolf (1976) , LeGuin (1989) highlights Tolfink’s refusal to dissolve into his surroundings. Tolfink “was a reliable narrator,” LeGuin claims (p. 29), because his carving bears witness to existence—that someone was there—as well as to the brevity of life ( Myerhoff, 2007 ). Thus, one useful way of understanding the motivating urge and desired consequences of acts of storytelling is as a primordial, existential form of bearing witness to human being and human suffering—an effort to claim or reclaim one’s humanity.

Of course, not all stories deal with the existential epics, twists of fate, dilemmas, or dramas of finite human experience or with the painful contradictions of a symbolic identity joined to an imperfect and limited body ( Becker, 1973 ). Crites (1971 , p. 296) emphasized how humans live “from the sublime to the ridiculous,” noting that our life experiences range from the sacred to the mundane “and the mundane stories are also among the most important means by which people articulate and clarify their sense of the world” ( Crites, 1971 , p. 296).

A somewhat different conception of the ridiculous, one that nevertheless attempts to turn greater attention to the realm of the mundane, has been advanced by Bamberg (2007) , who laments the disproportionate emphasis placed on “big” as opposed to “small” stories. Bemoaning the neglect of everyday, interpersonal interactions—the real stories of our lives ( Bamberg, 2004 )—through which identity is negotiated, Bamberg (2004 , 2006 ), Georgakopoulou and Goustos (2004) and Georgakopoulou (2006 , 2006 a , 2007 ) have exhorted researchers to concentrate on small stories. Although small stories are “not particularly interesting or tellable” and “not even necessarily recognized as stories” ( Bamberg, 2006 , p. 63), researchers focusing on small stories want to rectify what they interpret as the privileged and quasi-ontological status of big stories in narrative inquiry. The term “small stories” refers to “the smallness of talk, where fleeting moments of narrative orientation to the world ( Hymes, 1996 ) can be easily missed out by an analytical lens which only looks out for fully-fledged stories” ( Georgakopoulou, 2007 , p. 146). Narrative gets “taken down to size” ( Freeman, 2007 , p. 156) in research on small stories as investigators attempt to show how identity is constructed interpersonally, closer to the action of everyday life, and how images of the self are “thoroughly moored in social life” (p. 156).

In our opinion, the tensions between advocates of big and small stories are unfortunate and potentially obstructive. As Freeman (2006 , p. 132) observed, “There is plenty of meaning to go around,” and it is not a question of which type of story is truer to life. Big and small stories simply represent “different regions of life,” and neither can provide privileged access to truth ( Freeman, 2006 , p. 137).

Human beings are relational beings ( Gergen, 2009 ) whose identities rest on relationships with others. We are bound up with others, and our understanding of ourselves rests on our connections to others, whether casual or intimate. Thus, the question of how identity is made in interpersonal interaction deserves serious and concentrated attention. Small-story advocates, however, should not need to take an oppositional stance toward big-story inquiry in order to justify or defend their concern for how identity work is accomplished. The mundane and the sacred stand side by side; they do not compete with each other. They can best be conceived, in our opinion, as preferences for taking certain points of view toward our subject matter—narrative. In Rorty’s (1982) words, these different views are “not issue(s) to be resolved, only... differences to be lived with” (p. 197).

Still, we think it may be necessary for small-story researchers to address the grounds on which one can conclude that identity is a narrative achievement, as well as what kind of identity work we are talking about ( Eakin, 2008 ; Neisser, 1988 ). Scholars of small stories want us to stretch the meaning of story to accommodate their conception of storying as an interactional activity through which identities are created and negotiated. But by extending the idea of a story in this fashion, these researchers beg the question of whether a process referred to as “storying” ought to produce something akin to a story replete with many of the elements we ordinarily associate with narrative—plot, character, scene, an ethical standpoint subject to evaluation, or the kind of bearing witness to which LeGuin (1989) referred to in her discussion of Tolfink’s carving. No doubt, interactants in these small story studies are organizing and negotiating the meanings of experience and co-constructing reality, but should the process of communication by which their identities are made and/or changed be called storying? Is there a point at which an utterance or set of utterances can be too small or devoid of the elements of narrative reasonably to be called a story? Are the interactants themselves assuming a position akin to what Arthur Frank (2010) called “the standpoint of the storyteller?” Bamberg (2006 a ) has referred to some of his own interactional examples of identity in the process of being made as “story-like,” which evokes a question about how much like a story an utterance or a set of utterances needs to be for us to consider it or them a story.

Genres of Narrative Inquiry

One way of sorting the different agendas of narrative inquiry is to make distinctions between different types of narrative research. For example, Polkinghorne (1995) differentiated two distinct types of narrative inquiry that correspond to Bruner’s (1986) distinction between paradigmatic and narrative reasoning. In Polkinghorne’s (1995) schema, analysis of narratives refers to storytelling projects that are grounded on pragmatic reasoning. These projects treat stories as “data” and use “analysis” to arrive at themes that hold across stories or on delineating types of stories and/or storylines. Grounded theory ( Charmaz, 2000 , 2005 ; Glasser & Strauss, 1967 ), in which researchers work inductively from the ground of the stories upward and present the analysis in the form of a traditional social science report, is one method commonly used to analyze narratives. Later in this chapter, we will provide a more detailed discussion of various approaches to the analysis of narrative, including modes of conversation and discourse analysis akin to the small-story orientation of Bamberg (2006 a , 2007 ) and Georgakopoulou (2006 , 2006 a , 2007 ).

In Polkinghorne’s (1995) second type of narrative inquiry, which he calls narrative analysis , the research product is a story—a case, a biography, a life history, an autobiography, an autoethnography—that is composed by the researcher to represent the events, characters, and issues that he or she has studied. Polkinghorne (1995) clarifies the differences between the products of an analysis of narrative and a narrative analysis. Whereas an analysis of narrative(s) ends in abstractions, such as a set of themes, narrative analysis takes the form of a story. Unfortunately, this distinction can be confusing. For example, Riessman (1993) has written a methodological primer titled Narrative Analysis , but, within Polkinghorne’s (1995) typology, the kinds of narrative inquiry on which she focuses would fall under analysis of narrative not narrative analysis.

Beginning in graduate school, most social scientists are taught that research projects aren’t completed until the dots have been connected. Thus, it should come as no surprise that a great deal of narrative inquiry focuses on identifying themes and/or storylines. But the themes of a story don’t necessarily tell us what the story does, how it works, what relationships it shapes or animates, or how it pulls people together or breaks them apart. Moreover, narratives are typically analyzed from the perspective of the analyst, who often holds preconceived notions or hypotheses based on previous research literature about what he or she is likely to find (or discover) in the stories being studied. Stated simply, the standpoint of the analyst will be different from the standpoint of the storyteller, and these differing standpoints affect how the listener/researcher will hear, understand, and interpret the story.

Narrative inquiry is confronted by the troubling fact that what a story means to an analyst may be quite different from what a story means to the storyteller. Often, the storyteller wants a listener/analyst/researcher to “get into” his or her story, whereas a story analyst, especially a researcher, may be centrally interested in what he or she can “get out” or “take away” from a story ( Greenspan, 1998 ). We see a world of difference between treating stories as “data” for analysis—thus privileging the standpoint of the analyst—and encountering stories experientially—thus privileging the standpoint of the storyteller. In the former case, how a story makes sense is strictly a scientific/analytic question; in the latter case, it’s an ethical and relational one. In the former instance, the researcher wants to go beyond the story, to think about it and use it for the sake of advancing sociology, psychology, or communication theory; in the latter instance, storytelling is a means of being with others, of thinking with their stories in order to understand and care for them.

Paul Atkinson (2006 , 2010 ) represents the hyperorthodox camp of narrative inquiry, which sees no alternative but to subject stories to rigorous and methodical analysis. Indeed, he condemns any form of narrative inquiry that enters into a story “appreciatively” and from the standpoint of the storyteller. But as Arthur Frank (2010 , p. 5), a self-proclaimed “narrative exceptionalist,” points out, reluctance to take the standpoint of the storyteller risks failing to “recognize why the story matters deeply to the person telling it” ( Frank, 2010 , p. 6). Frank’s observation coincides with Denzin’s (1997) insistence that the living dialogue inspired by appreciative narrative inquiry needs to be set off from traditional empiricist approaches to the analysis of narratives. Following Trinh (1989 , p. 141), Denzin (1997) opposes the inclination to turn a story told into a story analyzed because, in effect, the meaning of the story is sacrificed at the altar of methodological rigor. Then we lose what makes a story a story: “They (the analysts) only hear and read the story from within a set of predetermined structural categories. They do not hear the story as it was told” ( Denzin, 1997 , p. 249).

Ordinarily, we understand or identify with characters in a story through a plot that ties together what happens and invites readers or listeners to evaluate the meanings of the actors’ actions and decisions. Here is the place where we enter an ethical dimension in which narratives invite evaluations of “goodness” and “character,” evoking reflections, evaluations, and reactions and calling up concerns about such things as “faithfulness,” “thoughtfulness,” and “responsiveness.” Often, we find ourselves evaluating or coming to terms with the degree to which characters have participated with and for others ( Ricoeur, 1992 ).

Dwelling in the moral space of narrative introduces an ethical standard that could be applied—we think should be applied—to the ways in which researchers relate and respond to the stories and storytellers they behold as well. To enact this ethical stance would alter what it means to be rigorous or to conduct methodical analysis. Frank (2010) insists that analysts need to be answerable to the storytellers whose stories they elicit and/or witness. Yet, the kind of analysis favored by hyperorthodox empiricists often takes the form of reductionism and thus “reduces stories to inert material devoid of spirit” ( Frank, 2010 , p. 6) and indifferent to the storyteller’s inspirations and interpretations.

Ironically, the so-called methodical research practices denounced by Frank (2010) are some of the same ones condemned during the crisis of representation that initially inspired the narrative turn. By treating narratives as unexceptional and narrative inquiry as no different from any other kind of social science inquiry, hyperorthodox narrativists implicitly dispute the very moral, ethical, political, and ideological grounds on which the narrative turn rests. Narrative exceptionalists, on the other hand, embrace drastically different views of objectivity and rigor, as well as what it means to be methodical. They see their work as itself a form of storytelling and they seek to talk to , talk with , and inquire as empathic witnesses on behalf of their research participants. They choose not to color over what they hear with concepts organized into systems of thought of interest to social scientists but of little relevance to participants themselves. By taking the standpoint of the storyteller, they promote a social science of caring and community, an engaged and passionate social science that requires researchers to develop caring relationships with the people they study instead of standing apart from them in the name of objectivity, rigor, and science ( Bochner, 2010 ). The narrative exceptionalists eschew the technologies of disengaged reason and seek instead a social science of narrative inquiry in which researchers open their hearts as well as their minds and listen attentively to stories that feel raw, cut deep, and resist distance and abstraction ( Bochner, 2010 ).

The distinction we have drawn between narrative exceptionalists and hyperorthodox narrative analysts may simply reflect the differences between those who situate research on storied lives within a poetic, embodied, ethical, existential, and ontologically driven ideal of narrative inquiry and those who still cling to the ideals of scientific knowledge as something to be possessed, ordered, and organized into determinate systems of mastery and control.

In the next two sections of this chapter, we divide narrative inquiry into work that takes the stance of the storyteller and work that takes the stance of the story analyst. We begin by sketching the development of several strands of narrative inquiry that fall within the rubric of what we consider the standpoint of the storyteller.

Personal Narratives: Putting Meanings into Motion

After Arthur Frank (2000 , 2010 ), we use the term “standpoint of the storyteller” to refer to personal narratives in which “the language of science merges with the aesthetics of art”( Benson, 1993 , p. xi). Although many types of life writing fall within this broad category—illness narratives, autobiographies, memoirs, and so on—we are concerned principally with works published by academics, especially first-person accounts, autoethnographies, self-narratives, performative narratives, and narrative ethnographies. These research stories are a genre of “artful science” ( Brady, 1991 ) insofar as they apply the imaginative power of literary, dramatic, and poetic forms to create the effect of reality, a convincing likeness to life as it is sensed, felt, and lived. As a form of expressive and dialogic inquiry, these stories break away from the traditional forms of mainstream, representational social science. The focus is less about “knowing” and more about living; less about controlling and more about caring; less about reaching immutable truths and more about opening dialogues among different points of view; less about resolving differences and more about learning how to live with them; less about covering life experience with disembodied concepts and more about finding ways to personify the “untamed wilderness” of lived experience (see Jackson, 1995 ).

Instead of going beyond, searching beneath, or edging behind—as Jackson (1995 , p. 163) says, “putting reality on the rack until it reveals objective truth”—social scientists drawn to this kind of artful, poetic social science want their work to produce “experiences of the experience” ( Bochner & Ellis, 1992 ; Ellis & Bochner, 1992 ). They want their readers to enter the experience of others, usually as empathic witnesses. By putting themselves in the place of others, readers or listeners are positioned to reflect critically on their own experience, to expand their social capabilities, and to deepen their commitment to social justice and caring relationships with others. The goal of this kind of evocative storytelling, which Richardson (2000) referred to as “creative analytic practices,” is to put meanings into motion, showing how people cope with exceptional, difficult, and transforming crises in their lives, how they invent new ways of speaking when old ways fail them, how they make the absurd sensible and the disastrous manageable, and how they turn calamities into gifts.

The corpus of narrative inquiry to which we are referring offers a distinctive alternative to traditional canons of research practices in the social sciences. These stories seek to activate subjectivity and compel emotional responses from readers; they long to be used rather than analyzed, to be told and retold rather than theorized and settled, to offer lessons for further conversation rather than truths without any rivals, and they promise the companionship of intimate detail as a substitute for the loneliness of abstracted facts. Evocative research stories not only breach ordinary and canonical inscriptions about living, but also challenge traditional norms of writing and research, encouraging social scientists to reconsider the goals of research and the conventions of academic writing, as well as to question the venerable divisions between Snow’s conception (1959) of two cultures of inquiry that segregate literature from social science.

The narrative turn marked a shift toward a more personal social science, one that already was proliferating in the mainstream press, new journalism, creative nonfiction, literary memoir, autobiography, and autopathography ( Buford, 1996 ; Harrington, 1997 ; Hawkins, 1993 ; Parini, 1998 ; Stone, 1997 ). Most of the genres of life writing (see, e.g., Tierney, 2000 ) were shifting toward more intimate, personal, and self-conscious writing. At about the same time, social science researchers began to embrace less anonymous, more personal styles of writing that paralleled the focus on personal writing genres in literature, nonfiction, and journalism. Among the abundant examples of this movement within the social sciences were special issues of journals such as the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography ( Ellis & Bochner, 1996 , a ), Qualitative Sociology ( Glassner, 1997 ; Hertz, 1997 ; Zussman, 1996 ), and Communication Theory ( Geist, 1999 ); the book series Ethnographic Alternatives edited by Ellis and Bochner ( Angrosino, 1998 ; Banks & Banks, 1998 ; Bochner & Ellis, 2001 ; Brady, 2002 ; Drew, 2001 ; Ellis & Bochner, 1996 ; Goodall, 2000 ; Gray & Sinding, 2003 ; Holman Jones, 1998 , 2007 ; Lagerway, 1998 ; Lockford, 2004 ; Markham, 1998 ; Pelias, 2004 ; Richardson & Lockridge, 2004 ; Tillmann-Healy, 2001 ; Trujillo, 2004 ); and a subsequent one edited by Bochner and Ellis ( Adams, 2011 ; Charles, 2007 ; Ellis, 2009 ; Frentz, 2008 ; Goodall, 2008 ; Nettles, 2008 ; Pelias, 2011 ; Poulos, 2008 ; Richardson, 2007 ; Rushing, 2005 ; Tamas, 2011 ); the edited collections by anthropologists ( Benson, 1993 ; Brady, 1991 ; Okely & Callaway, 1992 ); sociologists ( Ellis & Flaherty, 1992 ; Hertz, 1997 ; Zola, 1982 ), communication researchers ( Banks & Banks, 1998 ; Ellis & Bochner, 1996 ; Perry & Geist, 1997 ), psychologists (Lieblich & Josselson, 1997 ), and educators ( Hertz, 1997 ; Tierney & Lincoln, 1997 ); and the numerous articles, forums, and monographs (e.g., McLaughlin & Tierney, 1993 ) featured in academic journals and annuals such as American Anthropologist, Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly, Auto/Biography, Feminist Studies, Journal of Loss and Trauma, Life Writing, Narrative, Narrative Inquiry, The Narrative Study of Lives, Narrative Inquiry, Qualitative Inquiry, Qualitative Communication Research, Sociology of Sport Journal, Sociological Quarterly, Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Symbolic Interaction, Text and Performance Quarterly , and Women’s International Quarterly .

We can identify five distinguishing features of this type of personal narrative inquiry. First, the author usually writes in the first person, making her- or himself the object of research ( Tedlock, 1991 ), thus transgressing the conventional separation of researcher and subject ( Jackson, 1989 ). Second, the narrative breaches the traditional focus on generalization across cases by focusing on generalization within a single case extended over time ( Geertz, 1973 ). Third, the text is presented as a story replete with a narrator, characterization, and plotline, akin to forms of writing associated with the novel or biography and thus fractures the boundaries that traditionally separate social science from literature. Fourth, the story often discloses hidden details of private life and highlights emotional experience and thus challenges the rational actor model of social performance that dominates social science. And fifth, the ebb and flow of relationship experience is depicted in an episodic form that dramatizes the motion of connected lives across the curve of time ( Weinstein, 1988 ) and thus resists the standard practice of portraying a relationship as a snapshot ( Ellis, 1993 ).

Academic storytellers who adopt the stance of the storyteller hold a distinctly different understanding of the work they want narrative inquiry to do. They don’t see a split between theory and story but rather understand the aim of stories as putting meanings into motion ( Bochner, 2012 a ). They reject the received traditions of empiricism in favor of a relational, dialogic, qualitative, and collaborative conception of inquiry ( Gergen & Gergen, 2012 ). They are less concerned about representation and more concerned about communication. Giving up the illusion of transcendental observation, they seek to make narrative inquiry a source of connection, contact, and relationship between tellers and listeners by eliciting conversation and deliberation about the personal, political, moral, and institutional values associated with lived experience. They see stories as the fundamental human medium of being, knowing, and participating in a social world. As an academic practice, evocative narrative inquiry thus shifts the meaning of the activity of theorizing from a process of thinking about to one of thinking with ( Frank, 1995 , 2004 ). Theory merges with story when we invite others to think with a story rather than about it ( Bochner, 1997 , 2010 ). As listeners or readers, we are not asked merely to receive the story or analyze it from a distance, but rather to encounter it, get into it, and engage with it, using all the senses available to us ( Stoller, 1989 ). As Frank (1995 , p. 23) observed: “To think about a story is to reduce it to content and then analyze the content... to think with a story is to experience it affecting one’s own life and to find in that effect a certain truth of one’s own life.”

The point of an evocative personal narrative is not to turn the story into “data” in order to test or verify theoretical propositions and thereby produce knowledge that can be received by others. Instead, the objective is to link theory to story by inviting others to think and feel with the story, staying with it, resonating with the story’s moral dilemmas, identifying with its ambiguities, examining its contradictions, feeling its nuances, letting the story analyze them ( Frank, 2004 ). We think with a story from within the framework of our own lives. We ask what kind of person we are becoming when we take a story to heart and consider how we can use it for our own purposes, what ethical direction it points us toward, and what moral commitments it calls out in us ( Coles, 1989 ).

Forms of evocative narrative writing and performative social science ( Gergen & Gergen, 2012 ; Gray & Sinding, 2003 ) seek a personal connection between writer/performer and reader/audience. The stories invite others to think and to feel. To achieve this goal, a writer/researcher must depart the safe and comfortable space of conventional academic writing. Unfortunately, the conventions that regulate (and discipline) academic writing do not encourage forms of communicating research that can build a personal connection between the text and the reader/audience member. Normally, we don’t expect academic texts to make our hearts skip a beat ( Bochner, 2012 ; Hyde, 2010 ). But if our research has something to do with human longing, desire, fulfillment, pleasure, pain, loss, grief, or joy, shouldn’t we hold authors to some standard of vulnerability? Can our work achieve personal importance—can it matter—if the authors aren’t willing to show their faces? Shouldn’t one of the standards by which social science inquiry is judged be the extent to which readers feel the truth of our research stories?

Seeking to open a space for this kind of personal narrative inquiry, Ellis and Bochner (1996) developed a project they called “ethnographic alternatives” ( Bochner & Ellis, 2002 ; Ellis & Bochner, 1996 ). They took the poststructuralist critique to mean that social science writing could be usefully conceived as a material intervention into people’s lives, one that not only represents but also creates experience, putting meanings in motion. They believed that research texts, whether first-person accounts or more traditional ethnographic storytelling, could be understood as “acts of meaning” and, as Bruner (1990) suggested, that’s precisely the work of storytelling. Wanting to create a space in which social science texts could be viewed as stories and their authors—the researchers—as storytellers, Ellis and Bochner (1996) invited scholars to experiment with various forms of personal, emotional, and embodied narration that depart radically from the conventions of rational/analytic social science reporting. If we experience our lives as stories, they asked, then why not represent them as stories? Why shouldn’t social scientists represent life as temporally unfolding narratives and researchers as a vital part of the action? Their ethnographic alternatives project offered stories that showed the struggles of ordinary people coping with difficult contingencies of lived experience—brimming with characters, scenes, plots, and dialogue—stories that enabled readers to put themselves in the place of others ( Jackson, 1995 ) and consider important aspects of their own lives in the terms offered by the contexts and details of other peoples’ stories, such as how lived experience is riddled with contingencies that concede the incomplete and unfinished qualities of human relationships (e.g., Bochner & Ellis, 1992 ; Bochner, Ellis, & Tillmann-Healy, 1998 , 2000 ,; Ellis, 1996 ; Ronai, 1996 ; Tillmann-Healy, 1996 ).

Both Ethnographic Alternatives and the book series project that followed, Writing Lives: Ethnographic Narratives , problematized the conventions of writing in the social sciences. As scholars, we realize that there is no alternative but to turn life into language. But there is more than one way to do this. Traditional social science writing favors the types of events and “data” that are amenable to conceptual analysis and theoretical explanation. Ambiguous, vague, and contingent experiences that cannot so easily be covered by concepts or organized into a coherent system of thought are bypassed in favor of experiences that can be controlled and explained ( Bruner, 1990 ). Immediate experience is grist for the theoretical mill. Moreover, distancing oneself from the subject matter, like a spectator at a sporting event, is taken as an appropriate and normative model of research and writing practices. Thus, social science texts usually are written in a third-person, objectifying, neutral, and scientific voice. Although contradictions, emotions, and subjectivities may be recognized as concrete lived experiences, they usually are expressed in forms of writing that dissolve concrete events in solutions of abstract analysis. The reader is left to look through a stained glass window, to use Edith Turner’s (1993) apt analogy, seeing only murky and featureless profiles. The concrete details of sensual, emotional, and embodied experience are replaced by typologies and abstractions that remove events from their context, distancing readers from the actions and feelings of particular human beings engaged in the joint action of evolving relationships. Readers are not encouraged to see and feel the struggles and emotions of the participants and thus are deprived of an opportunity to care about the particular people whose struggles nourish the researcher’s hunger for truth. It is not hard to figure out why orthodox social science writing is not widely read. What is the appeal of an inaccessible, dry, and overly abstract text?

On the whole, social science research articles and monographs are confined mainly to what LeGuin (1986) refers to as “the father tongue,” a high-minded mode of expression that embraces objectivity. Spoken from above, the father tongue runs the risk of distancing the writer from the reader, creating a gap between self and other. What is missing from most social science writing is “the mother tongue” ( LeGuin, 1986 ), a binding form of subjective and conversational expression that covets “a turning together,” a relationship between author and reader. Voiced in a language of emotions and personal experience, the mother tongue exposes rather than protects the speaker through a medium that can bring author and reader closer together. The absence of a mother tongue in social science literature reflects the conventions of disembodied writing that extol the virtue of objectivity. As LeGuin (1989 , p. 151) notes, “People crave objectivity because to be subjective is to be embodied, to be a body, vulnerable, violable.” The real discourse of reason, she claims, is a wedding of the father to mother tongue, which produces “a native tongue.” When this fusion of voices occurs, which is rare indeed, it’s a beautiful thing ( Eastman, 2007 ).

Evocative narratives work the hyphen between the mother tongue and the native tongue. Unlike orthodox social scientists, those who assume the standpoint of the storyteller see themselves first and foremost as writers and communicators, not as reporters or conduits for channeling data from a source to a receiver. For these scholars, writing and/or performing stories is an interpretive practice; it’s their method for discovering, ordering, and communicating what they’ve experienced and what it can mean to and for others. They are committed to being rigorously empirical, but they don’t take that conviction as an end in itself. Instead, they apply it in tandem with an obligation to make their prose accessible, readable, and sensuous. Moreover, they don’t want to limit what they write about to what can be ordered into determinate, disembodied systems of knowledge because that leaves out the indeterminate, the ambiguous, the embodied, and the contradictory realms of experience in which so much of life is lived—the shadowy, painful, or fateful moments on which our lives turn one way or another, one direction or another.

Like most social science inquiry, the kind of social science writing that takes the standpoint of the storyteller aspires to truth, but the kind of truths to which it aspires are not literal truths; they’re emotional, dialogic, and collaborative truths. Not Truth but truth; not truth but truths. The truths of these stories exist between storyteller and story listener; they dwell in the listeners’ or readers’ engagement with the writer’s struggle with adversity, the heartbreaking feelings of stigma and marginalization, the resistance to the authority of canonical discourses, the therapeutic desire to face up to the challenges of life and to emerge with greater self-knowledge, the opposition to the repression of the body, the difficulty of finding words to make bodily dysfunction meaningful, the desire for self-expression, and the urge to speak to and assist a community of fellow sufferers. The call of these stories is for engagement within and between, not analysis from outside and at a distance ( Bochner, 2014 ).

This is not to say, as some critics mistakenly imply ( Atkinson, 2010 ), that writers who take the standpoint of the storyteller fail to live up to some abstract responsibility of social science called “analysis.” Reflection is the heart of personal narrative and autoethnography. As Vivian Gornick (2008) observed, “It is the depth of reflection that makes or breaks it.” The plot of these stories usually revolves around trouble, presenting feelings and decisions that need to be clarified and understood. The stories function as inquiry; something is being inquired into, interpreted, made sense of, and judged. Facts are important to these academic storytellers; they can and should be verified. But it is not the transmission of facts that gives the autoethnographic story or personal narrative its significance and evocative power. Facts don’t tell you what they mean or how they feel. The burden of the social science storyteller is to make meaning out of all the stuff of memory and experience; how it felt then and how it feels now. That’s why the truths of stories can never be stable truths ( Bochner, 2007 ). Memory is active, dynamic, and ever changing. As we grow older and/or change our perspective, our relationship to the events and people of the past changes too ( Hampl, 1999 ). The past is always open to revision and so, too, are our stories of them and what they mean now ( Ellis, 2009 ).

Narratives-Under-Analysis: Research Practices

Narratives-under-analysis refers to the analysis of narrative as story-form, what Riessman (2008) , calls “the systematic study of narrative data” (p. 6). We prefer the term, narratives-under-analysis to the misleading term “narrative analysis” because it better represents the forms in which this kind of narrative inquiry typically are expressed. Most scholars who use the term “narrative analysis” to describe their work do not analyze narratively. They do not produce analyses in a storied form. Rather, they abide by and adhere to the conventions of academic prose and procedural (scientific) objectivity. Treating narratives as objects to be deconstructed, they prefer to keep a comfortable distance ( Atkinson & Delamont, 2005 ) between themselves and the storytellers whose stories they place under their microscopes. Transforming stories, whether big or small, into data amenable to conceptual analysis and theoretical explanation, these researchers usually resist the temptation to ask tellers what they think they were doing or meaning, choosing instead to focus on their own inferences and interpretations—grounded in conventional practices of sociolinguistic and discourse analysis of what is said or told (producing themes or topics), how the telling is organized (its structure), how it is performed, and/or how it functions intersubjectively. As analysts, these researchers normally get the first and the last word. Stories are wrestled from the sensual, emotional, and embodied contexts of the storytellers’ lives and turned into texts that can be served up to the analyst’s interests in producing snippets of talk that document types or genres of speech acts or conversational maneuvers. Stories are subjected first to interpretive practices of transcription, then to further interpretive practices of one form or another aimed at grounded clarification of the meaning of the texts and their interactive production. To most researchers who place narratives-under-analysis, stories are no different from any other kind of data to which rigorous qualitative and/or quantitative methods can be applied ( Atkinson, 2010 ).

There are a broad array of questions and issues to which narratives-under-analysis have been applied. According to Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach, and Zibler (1998) , a study that analyzes narrative works with data that have been “collected as a story (a life story provided in an interview or literary work) or in a different manner (field notes of an anthropologist who writes up his or her observations as a narrative or in personal letters). It can be the object of the research or a means for the study of another question. It may be for comparison among groups, to learn about a social phenomenon or historical period, or to explore a personality” (pp. 2–3). Or, narratives-under-analysis can function as a means of exploring “how people weave tapestries of story” in order to “reveal the extent to which human intelligence itself is rooted in narrative ways of knowing, interacting, and communicating” ( Herman, 2009 , p. 9).

One of the primary ways in which human beings come to understand themselves and the world in which they live is by making meanings in storied forms. Thus, many narrative analysts view their work as an expression of human reasoning and meaning construction—“the principle way that human beings order their experience in time” and “make coherent sense out of seemingly unrelated sequences of events” ( Worth, 2008 , p. 42). Bamberg (2007) stresses that “narrative analysis is less interested in a narrator who is self-reflecting or searching who s/he (really) is. Rather, we are interested in narrators who are engaging in the activity of narrating, that is, the activity of giving an account” (p. 170), which contributes to “a more comprehensive human experience” ( Worth, 2008 , p. 42) of meaning-making. For these analysts of narrative practices, it is the how and for whom of narrative telling that is highlighted. Foregrounding the form and content of stories, they seek to understand how personal identity is made in everyday, mundane interaction, which necessitates careful attention to the parameters of storytelling contexts. Thus, the work of narrative-under-analysis involves the process of producing texts for analysis, applying systematic methodological and analytical strategies to examine these texts, and arriving at conclusions about the different forms and strategic moves of storytelling, including inferences about intentions or motives of narrator(s). Whereas evocative narrative takes the standpoint of the storyteller, narratives-under-analysis normatively are governed by an analytical standpoint that positions the researcher as “other” to the storytellers whose texts are to be analyzed.

Models of Analysis

Although most analysts still cling to one version or another of scientific rigor, Herman (2009) situates narrative analysis within a humanistic, poststructural perspective that turns away from modernist and received views of scientific inquiry and thus fits squarely within the narrative turn. Focusing on the performance of narrative or narrativity, narratives-under-analysis should ideally take into account the dispositions of tellers and listeners and pay close attention to the relationship between text and context. Assuming a critical and reflexive stance toward the structuralist tradition it seeks to transplant, Herman’s perspective on narratives-under-analysis seeks research models that can apply across the human sciences ( Herman, 1999 ). Herman (1999) refers to the proliferation of new models as “postclassical narratology” because it transforms previous ways of studying narrative by “not just expos[ing] the limits but also exploit[ing] the possibilities of the older, structuralist models” (p. 3). Thus, new models are situated as a critique of old ones. Still, modernist and structuralist models, such as the ones developed by Labov and Waletzky (1967) , Barthes (1975) , and Gee (1991) , continue to exert a visible influence in narratives-under-analysis literature.

Three models developed in the aftermath of the narrative turn have attracted considerable attention. Riessman’s (1993 , 2008 ) model highlights the notion that narratives are ambiguous and incomplete representations of experience and underscores the ways in which researchers are inevitably involved in the production of the narratives they gather or solicit in research. “Meaning is fluid and contextual, not fixed and universal,” she writes, and “all we have is talk and texts that represent reality partially, selectively, and imperfectly” (p. 15). Her model of narratives-under-analysis includes five levels of representation in the research process— attending, telling, transcribing, analyzing , and reading —and she stresses that “interpreting experience,” which happens at all five points in the research process, “involves representing reality; we create and recreate voices over and over again during the research process” (p. 16). Offering sage advice, especially for novices, Riessman (1993) reminds researchers that they are obliged to validate their interpretations; that persuasive writing buttressed by theoretical support and the presentation of alternative interpretations is necessary for showing the salience of analytical findings; that correspondence with participants must be established in order to remain attentive to what distinguishes different subject positions; that researchers should strive for both global (whole story) and local (subjective interpretation) coherence in order to keep analysis anchored in the embedded and emergent logic of narrative data; and that narrative analysis should be aligned with a pragmatic research agenda that avoids canonical approaches to theory and method. In a subsequent book, Riessman (2008) provides a survey of studies that analyzed narratives and a guide for designing interviews to elicit narratives. Together, these publications give useful guidelines for designing and carrying out analyses of narratives.

Herman’s (2009) model focuses mainly on the elements and characteristics of prototypical narratives themselves. For Herman (2009) , narrative is a unique form of knowledge production and communication. His model attempts to account for the “complex transactions that involve producers of texts or other semiotic artifacts, the texts or artifacts themselves, and interpreters of these narrative productions working to make sense of them in accordance with cultural, institutional, genre-based, and text-specific protocols” (p. 8). He considers narrative not only representational but also relational. Drawing attention to the intersubjective dimensions of narrative, his four-point model— situatedness, event sequencing, worldmaking/world disruption , and what it’s like —encourages scholars to construe narratives as representations situated in specific discourses. These discourses are ordered along a timeline in ways that introduce disruption or disequilibrium into the story-world conveyed by a narrator’s depiction of a particular experience. Beginning with a description of narrative elements, Herman’s (2009) model focuses on how people account for their experiences in story-forms and on the story-worlds in which these accounts are embedded and from which interpreters draw meaning.

Relying on their practical and clinical experience as psychologists, Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach, and Zibler (1998) classified approaches to narrative analysis into four modes—holistic-content, categorical-content, holistic-form, categorical-form—that could serve as a way of organizing narratives-under-analysis research across various social science disciplines. They drew attention to the connections between personal identity and social and cultural structures of meaning, claiming that by “studying and interpreting self-narratives, the researcher can access not only the individual identity and its systems of meaning but also the teller’s cultures and social world” (p. 9).

Together, these models provide a conceptual and methodological frame of reference for studies that place narratives under analysis. Still, no widespread agreement exists regarding the conceptual domain for studies using narratives-under-analysis strategies. Mishler (1995) is one of the few researchers to attempt a synthesis and comparative analysis with the goal of establishing a typology. Framing narrative analysis as a “problem-centered area of inquiry” (p. 88) that employs myriad approaches, philosophies, and methods, his typology can be viewed as a meta-model of the burgeoning field of narratives-under-analysis. Mishler (1995) made an admirable attempt to produce a coherent synthesis of the field that could strengthen ties between theory and method and enable comparisons among studies, although his call for “more inclusive strategies that would provide a more comprehensive and deeper understanding both of how narratives work and the work they do” ( Mishler, 1995 , p. 117) suggests that considerably more work needs to be done.

Josselson (2007) also advocates attention to meta-analyses of narrative research. She is especially keen on the intersubjective and dialogic qualities of storytelling and storytelling research, expressing the need for developing a knowledge base that allows scholars to “engage those areas of tensions where multiple facets of understanding intersect, interweave, collide, contradict and show themselves in their shifting and often paradoxical relation to each other” (p. 15).

We get the distinct impression that narrative inquiry is on the cusp of evolving as a discipline in its own right. In addition to the work of Josselson (2007) and Mishler (1995) , we can point to Cortazzi’s (1993) early review of the different disciplinary contributions to narrative inquiry, which showed the cacophony of approaches to narratives-under-analysis that scholars have taken, and the promise of narrative study for bridging the social sciences and humanities. We anticipate that the urge to achieve something akin to disciplinary status for narrative inquiry will continue to intensify over the coming decade.

Narratives-Under-Analysis Research Practices

We turn next to the practical side of narratives-under-analysis research, emphasizing some of the tensions that researchers confront as they seek to make appropriate and useful decisions about research practices and methodologies. One of the most important practical considerations is positioning .

Herman (2009) describes the paradigm that governs a considerable number of projects in which narratives are under analysis and in which researchers focus on “occasions of telling” ( Ochs & Capps, 2001 ): “Interviewers are seeking to obtain as much (vernacular) speech from informants as possible, in contrast with conversation among peers in which participants in the conversation may all be trying to capture the floor at once in order to tell their own version of the story under dispute” ( Herman, 2009 , p. 35). In light of the researcher’s or interviewer’s potential influence over what stories get told and how they may get told, it is imperative to recognize how one is positioned as a researcher on any particular occasion of telling.

Riessman (2008) also emphasizes how researchers “play a major part in constituting the narrative data that [they] analyze. Through [their] presence, and by listening and questioning in particular ways, [they] critically shape the stories participants choose to tell” (p. 50). Since different analysts carry out their investigations in different ways and find themselves inserted into the scene or occasion differently in particular research contexts, it is imperative that researchers attend to the ways in which they contextualize and frame the possible subject-positions of the storytellers. Storytellers always tell their stories to somebody in some place and the conversational partners and surrounding environment can influence what gets told or doesn’t, and how. Thus, it is crucial to consider the kind of interpersonal bond that is created between teller and listener. Is the analyst a full, part, or invisible participant in the storytelling interaction? Can the content of the narrative be interpreted as a fluid construction? Or is it more appropriate to interpret the story that is produced as a co-construction?

“Discursive negotiation is at the heart of the matter,” writes Kraus (2007 , p. 130). Identifying what counts as a storytelling context and where one stands as a researcher and/or analyst in relation to the story (and storyteller) involves locating oneself as a somebody somewhere on a spectrum between private and public story-worlds, micro and macro levels of human encounter, and emic and etic orientations to narrative data; that is, deciding whether or not interactional patterns in storytelling can be meaningfully interpreted from within the internal storytelling context or require consideration of external, cultural contexts as well. Recognizing these inherent tensions, Riessman (2008) advises that because “narration... depends on expectations” (p. 25), it behooves analysts to establish themselves as action-oriented and falling somewhere between approaches that have an intersubjective slant or maintain subject/object distinction—especially when preparing for interviews as a means of collecting narrative data.”

A second practical consideration involves formalizing the narratives to be analyzed. To interpret and analyze a story, the researcher must formalize it in one way or another. How this is accomplished depends not only on the empirical, conceptual, and theoretical issues with which the analyst is engaged, but also with the toolkit of methodological resources available. Narratives-under-analysis is largely a process of analytically retelling stories, which inevitably risks transforming stories into something unstorylike. As we mentioned earlier, analysts typically retell stories by way of their analyses and thus express what the stories mean in an analytic, often abstract, form. This can be a messy business insofar as it requires analysts to earn the trust of readers by showing that the process of analysis respects and maintains the integrity and coherence of the story and the context in which it was told. The text that is fashioned for analysis results from decisions by researchers about what they will examine and in what ways it will be interpreted and contextualized.

Riessman (2008) observes that approaches to narratives-under-analysis have recently ranged from thematic analysis (where the focus is on “what” is said or what gets “told”); to structural analysis (where the focus is on the “telling” of the story, how it is organized, and the experience of storytelling itself); to dialogic/performance analysis (where attention is paid to both thematic and structural components and to how talk evolves intersubjectively and collaboratively).

Although there are numerous ways to formalize narratives as texts, analysts must take into account “the material ‘facts’” ( Josselson, 2007 , p. 8) as well as “the meaningful shape emerging from selected inner and outer experiences” of storytellers (p. 8). Analysts should be held to a high standard of re-presentation, one in which they show sensitivity to the differences between what it may have been like to be the storyteller in comparison to what it is like to be the story analyst. Too many analysts have neglected issues of authority—whose story is it anyway?—and the important question raised by Coles (1997) : what gives us the right as researchers to elicit other people’s stories, leave the scene, and tell their stories to others ( Bochner, 2002 ; Plummer, 2001 )? Interpretive practices, such as narratives-under-analysis, are saturated with ethical questions and dilemmas. As analysts, we must remain vigilant and mindful of our obligations to storytellers and to the parts we ourselves play in producing formulated narratives for analysis.

This brings us to a third practical consideration—one we have been mentioning repeatedly throughout this chapter—researcher engagement with storytelling participants and their stories, which returns us to the issue of standpoints. What stance should one take toward the storyteller(s) and their stories? In most cases, the analyst/researcher faces the challenge of confirming participants not merely as subjects or storytellers, but as people who make or co-construct meaning narratively in conversation . Riessman (2008) urges researchers to be mindful of turns in talk, to pay attention to the length of participants’ responses in interviews, and to be thoughtful and considerate about the ways they probe for details that enrich the narrative. She asserts that these aspects of narrative research require researchers to “give up control, which can create anxiety” (p. 24), especially when the nature of the subject matter is personally or emotionally sensitive. “Although we have particular paths we want to cover related to the substantive and theoretical foci of our studies,” she says, “narrative interviewing necessitates following participants down their trails” (p. 24, emphasis in original). Similar to the orientation of Frank (1995 , 2004 , 2012 ), Riessman (2008) places significant emphasis on the relational dimension of narrativity. Calling attention to the sensitive nature of narrative as a fundamental process of identity construction through meaning-making and interpersonal bonding, she highlights how narratives “invite us as listeners, readers, and viewers to enter the perspective of the narrator. Interrogating how a skilled storyteller pulls the reader/listener into the story world—and moves us emotionally through imaginative identification—is what narrative analysis can do” (p. 9).

What’s the Use?

Narrative practices for everyday life.

[W]e should strive to show the payoffs of our field, to show, that is, how effectively employing the concepts behind the terms of narrative theory can illuminate—and even influence—the wide range of cultural phenomena that we study. Phelan (2005)

We want to conclude our journey along the trail of narrative inquiry by calling attention to some of the work that reflects a pragmatic impulse to make lives better. Once we have analyzed, conceptualized, categorized, and theorized narratives, what then? How can narrative knowledge be used and applied? Can narrative inquiry achieve its moral calling to make peoples’ actions and lives more intelligible to the people themselves, helping them achieve the humane goal of pronouncing themselves and their lives “good.” In other words, can narrative inquiry produce practical tools that help people form better relationships, overcome oppressive canonical identity narratives, amplify or reclaim moral agency, cope better with contingencies and difficulties experienced over the course of life, and thus live better lives?

Several exemplary cases exist. Beginning in the 1970s, White and Epston (1990) began a therapy practice that was initially conceived as “a storied therapy” and subsequently became widely recognized as “narrative therapy.” Concerned about the ways in which people and the problems they confront become fused, White and Epson (1990) developed a set of externalizing narrative practices and interventions designed to alter peoples’ beliefs that their problems are “internal to their self or the selves of others—that they or others are, in fact, the problem” ( White, 2007 , p. 9). The goal is to make the problem the problem , not the person—to experience an identity that is separate from the problem. To achieve this goal, a person must be disabused of the notion that the problem represents the “truth” about his or her identity. Construing therapy as a process of “storying” or “restorying” the lives and experiences of persons who come to them with problems, White and Epston (1990) introduced concrete narrative practices in the form of therapeutic letters, certificates, declarations, and other narrative means that promote healing and liberating stories. These practices promote a reflexive stance that can empower people to assume a sense of authorship over their experiences and relationships. Empowering people to live their lives intentionally and with greater personal agency, narrative therapists seek to free their clients to create stories that can provide meaning and direction to their lives ( Madigan, 2010 ; Parry & Doan, 1994 ; Payne, 2006 ).

Similarly, Penn (2001) has described the work of a research group in language and writing at the Ackerman Institute that focused on the healing effects of narrative writing practices on families who are suffering in silence with a chronic illness. “When we write,” Penn (2001) observes, “we are no longer being done to: we are doing ... when we write we construct our listener as one who is looking forward to hearing from us, not as someone waiting to withdraw” (p. 50). Penn wants sufferers of chronic illness to experience the multiple and sometimes competing inner voices, including the listening and witnessing voice, as co-existing and in need of expression in order to cope with the issues of identity that chronic illness introduces into their lives. The silenced families with whom she works write about their relationships to and feelings about each other and their illness. They bring what they’ve written to their sessions, read them aloud, and express feelings “in a new voice” that can become “a lifeline because of its power to reconnect the family and mitigate the effects of its relational traumas” (p. 33). Penn’s enthusiastic endorsement of the healing effects of writing personal stories about traumatic experiences has been echoed by Pennebaker (1997) , who presents evidence of the positive health benefits of writing emotionally about the unspoken feelings and thoughts one experiences while coping with illness or trauma; Harris (2003) , who views personal writing as a mode of translating “the physical world into the world of language where there is an interplay between order and disorder, wounding and repair” (p. 2); DeSalvo (1999) , who endorses therapeutic writing as a mode of caring for one’s self, a form of self-analysis and self-restitution that can shift one’s perspective and thus help people integrate deeply experienced but unexpressed emotions linked to traumatic events provided it is done correctly; and Herman (1997) , who cautions that “as the survivor summons her memories, the need to preserve safety must be balanced against the need to face the past” (p. 176). For Herman, traumatic memories are prenarrative, and the work of confronting them involves a process of integrating them into one’s life story, a narrative practice akin to what Greenspan (1998) called “recounting,” a struggle between meaning and memory that was elegantly captured by one of the Holocaust survivors he studied, Leon, who observed: “It is not a story. It has to be made a story...(p. xvi).

Frank (2000) is unapologetic about his desire “to make ill people’s stories more highly credited primarily among the ill themselves and then among those who care for them” (p. 136). Frank’s agenda is unequivocally activist and political: “I hope to shift the dominant cultural conception of illness away from passivity—the ill person as ‘victim of’ disease and then recipient of care—toward activity” ( Frank, 1995 , p. xi). He sees one of the main challenges of illness as the construction of a story that can function as a meaningful and self-validating moral narrative. Recognizing the political, ethical, and personal consequences of affirming the voices of the afflicted, Kleinman (1988) emphasizes the reflexive quality of personal narratives, observing that “the personal narrative does not merely reflect illness experience, but rather it contributes to the experience of symptoms and suffering” (p. 49). The ill person must negotiate the spaces between the domination of cultural scripts of bodily dysfunction out of which one’s meanings are constructed and defined and the situated understanding of one’s experience that seeks a unique personal meaning for suffering. Illness narratives need to be told not only because the telling of the story can provide the therapeutic benefits of redemptive understanding, but also because of the political consequences of connecting the body to the self, revealing embodiment and emotionality as legitimate and significant mediums of lived experience and inscribing bodily dysfunction with positive meaning and value ( Ellis, 1998 ). These stories bring suffering bodies out of the darkness of the alley into the light of day, transgressing the taboos against telling and risking rejection in the name of the right to speak and the longing to be heard ( Bochner, 2001 ). “To tell the story of one’s affliction,” writes Hawkins (1993 , p. 190), “becomes a way to distance it from oneself, to move beyond it, to repair its damages and return to the living community—in a word, to heal.”

On the other side of the illness equation—the side of physicians—Charon ( Charon, 2008 ; Charon & Montello, 2002 ) has worked tirelessly to develop practices of narrative medicine in which the health practitioner “recognizes suffering, provides comfort, and honors the stories of illness” ( Charon, 2008 , p. ix). She wants health care practitioners to be stirred by stories of illness, which means they must develop narrative competence . To achieve narrative competence doctors must develop a capacity for close reading, be able to acknowledge their own emotional responses to the suffering they witness, and value narrating as a means of engagement as well as an ethical obligation. Charon (2007) wants doctors to bestow attention on patients, to represent what they witness in accessible language and to participate in reflective clinical writing. “Instead of depleting us, this [narrative medicine] care replenishes us,” writes Charon (2006) , “for our suffering helps our patients to bear theirs” (p. 236).

Attempting to reach deep into the unsettled subjectivity of a clinical ethicist—in this case his own— Zaner (2004) invites readers to sit at the bedside of some of the most heartbreaking and demanding cases of medical morality one could imagine. Beleaguered, vexed, and menaced by the emotional and embodied plight of patients teetering on the edge of oblivion, Zaner (2004) wavers between hope and despair, enacting a reflexive relatedness and openness to otherness through the medium of storytelling. Here, at the border region of mortality, Zaner (2004) musters the courage to listen intensely, focus reflectively, and connect humanely in an atmosphere riddled with dreadful contradictions, painful ironies, and wretched vulnerabilities. This is a border encircled by sharp edges, where decisions must be made and mortality cannot be denied. Still, Zaner (2004) recognizes that “relationships are the centerpiece of ethics,” and his stories show how one might openly and fearlessly engage in such an encounter from the depths of one’s own subjectivity. Going deep, Zaner (2004) attempts to come to grips with questions such as how we can live “and make sense of our lives in the face of the awful happening of chance events” ( Zaner, 2004 , p. 101) or what can be said or done when the help one needs simply can’t be provided. In the process of searching, probing, and questioning, he delivers a heartening and uplifting expression of what ethical dialogue can mean and do.

Nelson (2001) , also a narrative ethicist, has introduced the concept of the counterstory as a means of resistance and repair for people suffering the diminished moral agency associated with oppressive canonical identities. “Oppression often infiltrates a person’s consciousness,” she observes, “as her oppressors want her to, rating herself as they rate her” (p. 7). When this happens, a person’s identity is damaged. To become a moral agent in one’s own right, agency must be freed from the grips of oppressive master narratives. An identity damaged by oppressive master narratives must be repaired. The counterstory is a purposeful attempt to shift the meaning of a person’s or community’s social identity by dislodging the oppressive qualities of a master narrative. Nelson believes that the communities in which we are enmeshed impose on and constrain our understanding of ourselves and often deprive us of opportunities to become authors of our own actions. Master narratives that construct images and identities of the elderly, gender, race, sexuality, and disability can be neutralized by good counterstories that directly contest the narratives they resist and repudiate, offering the potential for wide circulation.

In the sphere of tourism, Noy (2012) has focused attention on identifying how subversive counterstories work their way into the performative spaces of historical and memorial sites, which can turn out to be spaces in which meanings can be contested. Usually, these sites are intended to maintain power and authority over the truth of historical “facts,” in particular how they will be remembered and understood. But the same site can mean many different things to different people and groups ( Noy, 2012 ) and thus these sites hold the performative potential to destabilize and transform the largely ideological meanings and feelings attached to and promoted by these historical places. When tourist spaces are performative “they get people to engage, to move around, to carry and create meanings in public spaces” (p. 147) and, consequently, to introduce and amplify alternative, even subversive, narratives.

The coercive power of a story also has been discussed by Freeman (2010) as an expression of what he calls narrative foreclosure , “the conviction that one’s story is effectively over, that no prospect exists for opening up a new chapter of one’s life” (p. 12). To foreclose on a narrative is to become a prisoner of one’s story, to be walled in and weighed down, obscuring all possibility of narrative freedom. Freeman (2010) emphasizes “the poetic labor of narrative” (p. 152) associated with practices of hindsight , which can renew or regenerate a narrative frozen in time. The challenge is “to break away from them and sap them of their coercive power... identifying and naming” (p. 13) the narrative one has been living.

Freeman (1997 , 2010 ) has introduced two other narrative practices, one allied with the delayed quality of memory work, the other with decisions about how to act in consequential situations that will later be remembered. Moral lateness refers to the recollection and refashioning of memories through which “we see now what we couldn’t see then”—that we did not do the right thing. We were blind to the moral choices of right or wrong, or good or bad, that we faced on that occasion. Now, we feel forced to face the remorse, regret, or repentance that these memories evoke. Can we forgive ourselves? Can we reconcile how we see ourselves now in light of what we did then?

Narrative integrity ( Freeman, 1997 ) is a practice concerned with the other end of the temporal dimension of narrative, the call of the future, which one day likely will be a memory. As a life practice, narrative integrity anticipates how we will remember what we are planning to do now or next. One day in the future, the story of how I am about to act will be a tale I will look back on either with pride and gratification or shame and degradation. Which will it be? Can I take stock of my options and authorize a story that dignifies and honors my actions? By exercising narrative integrity, we seize an opportunity to make narrative a part of the fabric of our experience and memory as we live it.

All of these innovations in narrative practices call attention to what storytelling does, how it normalizes as well as how it can transgress; how the stories we tell are constrained by patterns of relationship, culture, and history; which stories get told and which ones stay untold; who gets to speak and who must remain silent; how stories heal and how they can damage.

Small-story researchers have shown that informal, everyday interactions are an important site of subjectivity and meaning-making, a site of narrative performances in which identity is performed and negotiated. In moment-to-moment, everyday interaction, people perform and negotiate identities, using small stories to achieve what Goffman (1959) once called a working consensus on the definition of the situation and to place identity under construction. Big-story researchers, conversely, have shown that human beings have a strong urge to dwell at the crossroad of narration and reflection. We are historical creatures who find ourselves thrown into the chaos of a mortal life lived in deep temporality—between birth and death, between history and destiny, between what we have inherited and experienced from the past and what we anticipate and can become in the future ( Ricoeur, 1981 ). In short, human life is saturated with “an autobiographical imperative” ( Eakin, 1985 , pp. 275–278), a longing to make sense of the plural unity of time—past, present, and future. As long as we can remember, and remember remembering, we are likely to remain steadfast in our determination to recover the past and stretch what we make of it across the trajectory of our lives. Although it is true that we appear to live only in the present, we also “sojourn in the land of memory” ( Hampl, 1999 ). Thus, it is more accurate to say that we live in between, perpetually moving forward into experience and backward into memory. Big-story researchers have shown that the narrative work of memory, the struggle between meaning and memory, involves both listening to and expressing what our memories tell us in the hope that our second and third draft can improve on the first.

We do not have a crystal ball in which to look into the future and anticipate the next turns in narrative inquiry. We will be pleased if narrative inquiry continues to situate itself within an intermediate zone between science and art, self and others, big stories and small stories, and theories and stories, and is understood and regarded as a meeting place for storytellers that promotes multiplicity and diversity, where head and heart go hand in hand, and embodied narrators work to produce a rigorous and creative body of scholarship that is passionate, political, personal, critical, open-ended, enlightening, pleasurable, meaningful, useful, and sufficiently evocative to keep the conversation going.

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the helpful encouragement and feedback of Carolyn Ellis and Norman Denzin.

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• Section 2: Home
• Developing the Quantitative Research Design
• Qualitative Descriptive Design
• Design and Development Research (DDR) For Instructional Design
• Qualitative Narrative Inquiry Research

What is a Qualitative Narrative Inquiry Design?

Tips for using narrative inquiry in an applied manuscript, summary of the elements of a qualitative narrative inquiry design, sampling and data collection, resource videos.

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Narrative inquiry is relatively new among the qualitative research designs compared to qualitative case study, phenomenology, ethnography, and grounded theory. What distinguishes narrative inquiry is it beings with the biographical aspect of C. Wright Mills’ trilogy of ‘biography, history, and society’(O’Tolle, 2018). The primary purpose for a narrative inquiry study is participants provide the researcher with their life experiences through thick rich stories. Narrative inquiry was first used by Connelly and Calandinin as a research design to explore the perceptions and personal stories of teachers (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). As the seminal authors, Connelly & Clandinin (1990), posited:

Although narrative inquiry has a long intellectual history both in and out of education, it is increasingly used in studies of educational experience. One theory in educational research holds that humans are storytelling organisms who, individually and socially, lead storied lives. Thus, the study of narrative is the study of the ways humans experience the world. This general concept is refined into the view that education and educational research is the construction and reconstruction of personal and social stories; learners, teachers, and researchers are storytellers and characters in their own and other's stories. In this paper we briefly survey forms of narrative inquiry in educational studies and outline certain criteria, methods, and writing forms, which we describe in terms of beginning the story, living the story, and selecting stories to construct and reconstruct narrative plots. 

Attribution: Reprint Policy for Educational Researcher: No written or oral permission is necessary to reproduce a tale, a figure, or an excerpt fewer that 500 words from this journal, or to make photocopies for classroom use. Copyright (1990) by the American Educational Research Association; reproduced with permission from the publisher. 

• Example Qualitative Narrative Inquiry Design

First, the applied doctoral manuscript narrative inquiry researcher should recognize that they are earning a practical/professional based doctorate (Doctor of Education), rather than a research doctorate such as a Ph.D. Unlike a traditional Ph.D. dissertation oral defense where the candidates focus is on theory and research, the NU School of Education applied doctoral candidate presents their finding and contributions to practice to their doctoral committee as a conceptual professional conference level presentation that centers on how their study may resolve a complex problem or issue in the profession. When working on the applied doctoral manuscript keep the focus on the professional and practical benefits that could arise from your study. If the Applied Doctoral Experience (ADE) student is unsure as to whether the topic fits within the requirements of the applied doctoral program (and their specialization, if declared) they should reach out to their research course professor or dissertation chair for guidance. This is known as alignment to the topic and program, and is critical in producing a successful manuscript. Also, most applied doctoral students doing an educational narrative inquiry study will want to use a study site to recruit their participants. For example, the study may involve teachers or college faculty that the researcher will want to interview in order to obtain their stories. Permission may be need from not only the NU Institutional Review Board (IRB), but also the study site. For example, conducting interviews on campus, procuring private school district or college email lists, obtaining archival documents, etc. 

The popularity of narrative inquiry in education is increasing as a circular and pedagogical strategy that lends itself to the practical application of research (Kim, 2016). Keep in mind that by and large practical and professional benefits that arise from a narrative inquiry study revolve around exploring the lived experiences of educators, education administrators, students, and parents or guardians. According to Dunne (2003), 

Research into teaching is best served by narrative modes of inquiry since to understand the teacher’s practice (on his or her own part or on the part of an observer) is to find an illuminating story (or stories) to tell of what they have been involved with their student” (p. 367).

• Temporality – the time of the experiences and how the experiences could influence the future;
• Sociality – cultural and personal influences of the experiences; and;
• Spatiality – the environmental surroundings during the experiences and their influence on the experiences. 

From Haydon and van der Riet (2017)

• Narrative researchers collect stories from individuals retelling of their life experiences to a particular phenomenon. 
• Narrative stories may explore personal characteristics or identities of individuals and how they view themselves in a personal or larger context.
• Chronology is often important in narrative studies, as it allows participants to recall specific places, situations, or changes within their life history.

Sampling and Sample Size

• Purposive sampling is the most often used in narrative inquiry studies. Participants must meet a form of requirement that fits the purpose, problem, and objective of the study
• There is no rule for the sample size for narrative inquiry study. For a dissertation the normal sample size is between 6-10 participants. The reason for this is sampling should be terminated when no new information is forthcoming, which is a common strategy in qualitative studies known as sampling to the point of redundancy.

Data Collection (Methodology)

• Participant and researcher collaborate through the research process to ensure the story told and the story align.
• Extensive “time in the field” (can use Zoom) is spent with participant(s) to gather stories through multiple types of information including, field notes, observations, photos, artifacts, etc.
• Field Test is strongly recommended. The purpose of a field study is to have a panel of experts in the profession of the study review the research protocol and interview questions to ensure they align to the purpose statement and research questions.
• Member Checking is recommended. The trustworthiness of results is the bedrock of high-quality qualitative research. Member checking, also known as participant or respondent validation, is a technique for exploring the credibility of results. Data or results are returned to participants to check for accuracy and resonance with their experiences. Member checking is often mentioned as one in a list of validation techniques (Birt, et al., 2016).

Narrative Data Collection Essentials

• Restorying is the process of gathering stories, analyzing themes for key elements (e.g., time, place, plot, and environment) and then rewriting the stories to place them within a chronological sequence (Ollerenshaw & Creswell, 2002).
• Narrative thinking is critical in a narrative inquiry study. According to Kim (2016), the premise of narrative thinking comprises of three components, the storyteller’s narrative schema, his or her prior knowledge and experience, and cognitive strategies-yields a story that facilitates an understanding of the others and oneself in relation to others.

Instrumentation

• In qualitative research the researcher is the primary instrument.
• In-depth, semi-structured interviews are the norm. Because of the rigor that is required for a narrative inquiry study, it is recommended that two interviews with the same participant be conducted. The primary interview and a follow-up interview to address any additional questions that may arise from the interview transcriptions and/or member checking.

Birt, L., Scott, S., Cavers, D., Campbell, C., & Walter, F. (2016). Member checking: A tool to enhance trustworthiness or merely a nod to validation? Qualitative Health Research, 26 (13), 1802-1811. http://dx.doi.org./10.1177/1049732316654870

Cline, J. M. (2020). Collaborative learning for students with learning disabilities in inclusive classrooms: A qualitative narrative inquiry study (Order No. 28263106). Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (2503473076). 

Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1990). Stories of Experience and Narrative Inquiry. Educational Researcher, 19 (5), 2–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/03323315.2018.1465839

Dunne, J. (2003). Arguing for teaching as a practice: A reply to Alasdair Macintyre. Journal of Philosophy of Education . https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.00331 

Haydon, G., & der Riet, P. van. (2017). Narrative inquiry: A relational research methodology suitable to explore narratives of health and illness. Nordic Journal of Nursing Research , 37(2), 85–89. https://doi.org/10.1177/2057158516675217

Kim, J. H. (2016). Understanding Narrative Inquiry: The crafting and analysis of stories as research. Sage Publications. 

Kim J. H. (2017). Jeong-Hee Kim discusses narrative methods [Video]. SAGE Research Methods Video https://www-doi-org.proxy1.ncu.edu/10.4135/9781473985179

O’ Toole, J. (2018). Institutional storytelling and personal narratives: reflecting on the value of narrative inquiry. Institutional Educational Studies, 37 (2), 175-189. https://doi.org/10.1080/03323315.2018.1465839

Ollerenshaw, J. A., & Creswell, J. W. (2002). Narrative research: A comparison of two restorying data analysis approaches. Qualitative Inquiry, 8 (3), 329–347. 

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Principles of Social Research Methodology pp 101–115 Cite as

Narrative Inquiry, Phenomenology, and Grounded Theory in Qualitative Research

• Rabiul Islam 4 &
• Md. Sayeed Akhter 5  
• First Online: 27 October 2022

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Narrative inquiry, phenomenology, and grounded theory are the basic types of qualitative research. This chapter discusses the three major types of qualitative research—narrative inquiry, phenomenology, and grounded theory. Firstly, this chapter briefly discusses the issue of qualitative research and types. Secondly, it offers a conceptual understanding of narrative inquiry, phenomenology, and grounded theory including their basic characteristics. Finally, the chapter provides an outline of how these three types of qualitative research are applied in the field.

• Narrative inquiry
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• Grounded theory
• Qualitative research

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Islam, R., Sayeed Akhter, M. (2022). Narrative Inquiry, Phenomenology, and Grounded Theory in Qualitative Research. In: Islam, M.R., Khan, N.A., Baikady, R. (eds) Principles of Social Research Methodology. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5441-2_8

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Narrative Inquiry

The primary purpose for a narrative inquiry study is participants provide the researcher with their life experiences through thick rich stories. Narrative inquiry can reveal unique perspectives and deeper understanding of a situation, often giving voice to marginalized populations whose perspective is not often sought. 

• Qualitative Study Design: Narrative Inquiry
• Colette Daiute Discusses Narrative Methods Professor Colette Daiute explains her take on narrative methods, which seeks to understand the relationships and context that affect a story and how it is told. Though the concept and execution of narrative research was once highly dependent on the researcher's field, now narrative inquiry is more interdisciplinary.
• An Introduction to Narrative Methods Professor Ann Phoenix explains what makes a narrative, and describes what researchers look for in narrative analysis. She also discusses influential approaches formed by William Labov and Michael Bamberg.
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