A detour before the third and final part of the story practice note. I’ve been writing up narrative method and thought it might be useful to share this piece. It comes from a thing I wrote for Sage Publications a few years back, with some amendments. I’m relieved to find it seems to stand the test of time as a decent method statement.
‘In any research topic, there are two overarching questions that have to be addressed: what is the object of the enquiry and how can it be enquired into’ | Hollway, W & Jefferson T |Doing Qualitative Research Differently:Free association, narrative and the interview method
Narrative enquiry seeks to emerge episodes and materials which might illuminate a greater whole.
The narrative enquirer is often regarded as a ‘fellow traveller’ (Gabriel 2000) with insiders in the organization, even if only on a short journey. Paying careful attention to use of anecdotes, metaphor, language and symbol, to what is not said, to the context in which it is said, creates insight into the qualities of an experience which are not immediately accessible to the subject through their own literal interpretation of an experience and the meaning it holds for them. A goal is to pull the raw material right through the process.
Documentation of the collecting process needs to thorough, (audio, video, email exchanges, journals, fieldnotes, diaries, bulletins, images, and the objects which are created (reports, essays, oral materials) need to travel and do work beyond the immediate remit of the assignment, with both predictable and unpredictable results, while not compromising privacy or confidentiality.
One challenge in the enquiry is how truth is compromised by the storytellers motivations, memory and anxiety. Another is that people will tend to recall the extraordinary, the vivid and the luminous not the ordinary, the mundane and the banal, so routines are overlooked.
There are particular, ironic, challenges in narrative research, in that the tendency is to recall a well-rehearsed story. And a well-rehearsed story or ‘whole’ episode is likely to contain drama. Indeed the insight we seek may not qualify, in the mind of the subject, as a story at all. So we need to look for gaps and hidden qualities and apparent ‘nothings’, as well as the more evident something which story-seeking questions throw up.
There is something beyond the ‘nothings’ which is the hiddens, and these may, or may not be, easy or appropriate to identify. In his book The Gate of the Sun Elias Khoury weaves together true life stories of Lebanese refugee camps into a fictional setting. At one point, the narrator is talking to a someone in a coma and he says ‘You only spoke about one woman, and even that one you only talked about a little. Piecing the tale together and arranging or scattered sentences, I turned it into a story. But you only mentioned love incidentally. You jumped over the essential story as though it was a pool and you were afraid of drowning.’
This can happen with narrative research too. Sometimes, interviewees will jump over the essential story ‘as though it was a pool’ and the interviewer must judge whether it is appropriate to pay attention to this or not.
Researchers cannot be detached but must examine subjective involvement to help to shape the way in which they interpret the interview data and other materials.
Sometimes fiction and fantasy, or imagery or metaphor might be a better way to access or convey difficult issues but are easier for sponsors to reject out of hand if it feels too counter cultural.
There is also the temptation for the enquirer to draw on other observations, outside the actual product of the interviews between researcher and subject. There needs to be agreement as to the degree to which inference is valid or peripheral vision – things noticed which creep beyond the scope of the specific piece of research – should be permitted. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) are very encouraging about completely situating the enquirer and encouraging them to journal and interpret. Embracing, but putting a careful boundary round, subjective interpretation, while making room for a shared view to emerge is an important, role that articulating the enquiry as narrative can make methodologically.
In addition, the positioning of the researchers needs to be considered. They need to be seen as clearly kinds of episodes collected through narrative research are, in part, skewed by the assumption of an authority figure and the relationship of the subject (or the enquirers) with faceless authority figures in general. Censorship and self-censorship arising from denial or partial perceptions, are often compounded by assumptions by the interviewee, in organisational settings, as to the sponsor, the sponsor’s real, as opposed to espoused, intentions, and the seriousness with which they as subjects of the enquiry will be paid attention to, so there are often politics or gaming, intentional or unintentional, in what’s being shared.
The challenges of developing consistent standards in this kind of approach are compounded by Sparknow’s particular leaning towards collaborative enquiry, often working in partnership with untrained volunteers in the client to build a sharper provocation and a deeper set of insights, while risking a more uneven, subjective and rawer approach. We take the view that this kind of situated learning has a value in its own right.
There is also a significant question of reality, truth and meaning. In qualitative and quantitative research it might be fair to say that you assume the subject knows himself well, has an accurate memory, can convey knowledge to a strange listener and is motivated to tell the truth. In our experience this is rarely the case. Often the processes associated with the whole of the working activity are regarded by the worker as subordinate to the ‘real’ parts of the work. Another challenge is that the holder of the experience can be genuinely unaware of their own filters and assumptions and so can only convey part of the experience, even with an experienced interviewer or sound process. Finally, as we’ve mentioned, there’s a tendency towards the dramatic, or to the inert and the indifferent.
This is a thing the organisation has done to me, and look what it’s doing to me.I told them all this when the put the system in.
So there’s an abdication of responsibility for process and so for giving a truthful rendition. Outsiders are shiny, interesting and a new channel for grievance, or they are to be paid lip-service to, because they can make no dent and will pass on, leaving the same on stuff in place. So the enquirer needs to be alert to the motives of participants in sharing particular aspects of the organization or their take on things.
The art, in crafting an intervention and decided how to thread narrativeness through its components, is to have enough of an early sense of the clients and the networks through which one must work, to create a firmly anchored but vivid place of engagement, reassuring, but with enough surprise shot through it that it interrupts (a narrative device in itself) expectation and draws people in despite themselves.
Clandinin, D Jean & Donnelly, F Michael, Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research, Jossey-Bass, 2000, San Francisco
Hollway, Wendy & Jefferson, Tony ‘Doing qualitative research differently: free association, narrative and the interview method’ Sage Publications, 2000, London
Gabriel, Yiannis, Storytelling in Organizations: Facts, Fictions, and Fantasies, OUP 2000, NY
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