INTRODUCTION
Human beings are storying creatures.
We make sense of the world and the things that happen to us by constructing
narratives to explain and interpret events both to ourselves and to other
people. The narrative structures and the vocabularies that we use when we craft
and tell our tales of our perceptions and experiences are also, in themselves,
significant, providing information about our social and cultural positioning:
to paraphrase Wittgenstein, the limits of my language are the limits of my
world.
In recent times there has been what
has been described as a narrative and auto/biographical turn within the social
sciences. This ‘turn’ is associated with post-modernism and the concomitant
lack of faith in grand, master or meta narratives. For researchers this has
opened up the possibility of explicitly framing and realising their research in
terms of it both being, and using, narrative.
DISCUSSION
A. Definition of Narrative Research
Narrative
research deal with the human experience. A narrative provides links,
connections and meaning to human activity. The stories told bring together the
diverse aspects of the human experience. Narrative as data acquired through
research may utilize story telling, life history, in depth interview, biography
or focus groups. It usually recounts one person's experience.
Essentially, ‘narrative
meaning is created by noting that something is a ‘part’ of a whole, and that
something is a ‘cause’ of something else’.Narratives provide links, connections,
coherence, meaning, sense. ‘Narrative descriptions exhibit human activity as
purposeful engagement in the world. Narrative is the type of discourse that
draws together diverse events, happenings and actions of human lives’. So far,
so general. Donald Polkinghorne’s definitions could be taken to apply to many
different types of communicative accounts that are used in all spheres of life.
Consequently, accounts of research that describe controlled experiments and
report statistical data and findings could well be considered to be narratives
within these parameters. However, in terms of research activity, narrative
research is usually associated with qualitative methodologies and methods, both
in terms of the sorts of data qualitative research collects and works from, and
with regard to how that data is analysed/interpreted and then
re-presented.
Narrative research is
research that is concerned with stories. These can be stories as told and they
can be stories that we enquire into: narratives as data, data as narratives.
Referring specifically to sociologists, although, we would argue, with
application to any of the social disciplines.
B. Characteristic of
Narrative Research
1. Liminality
We might
begin to identify a good story by its liminal qualities, whereby the narrative
in some way takes us from the threshold of one experience to another
2. Transgression
The
transgressive qualities of a story might serve to enhance its quality.
3.
Evocation
The
importance of evocation, whereby we are emotionally moved by the text; it
evokes in us feelings of happiness or sadness, reminding us perhaps of similar
feelings that we have experienced ourselves in our own lives.
4.
Complexity
The use of
complex forms of writing can often provide the text with added impact and make
a substantive contribution to the ideas and views being expressed in the
writing.
5.
Creativity
Whilst
notions of creativity continue to be contested, it is commonplace to talk of
writing in terms of its creative qualities.
6.
Audience Engagement
There is a sense in which the
narrative has to ‘reach out’ to the listener or the reader in order to draw
them in to the story being told.
1.
Substantive Contribution
Under this
criterion we would begin to examine the way in which the narrative might be
seen to contribute to our understanding of social and cultural life.
2.
Aesthetic Merit
The
aesthetic quality of a narrative relates literally to its ability to ‘open our
senses’ (this could be contrasted with its anaesthetic qualities, wherein our
senses are dulled).
3.
Reflexivity and Participatory Ethics
Narrative
approaches to educational research can be safely described within the context
of post modern or, more specifically post structural, epistemologies and
methodologies.
4.
Impact
In using
narrative approaches to educational research we would need to look at the
narratives being used in terms of their ability to evoke responses in others,
to transgress taken for granted ways of thinking and possibly to invoke an
emancipatory agenda.
5.
Experience- Near
If narratives are seen as
representations of the way in which we ‘story’ our worlds then it seems
reasonable to ask if the text appears to be ‘truthful’ or if it acts as a fair
representation of the events that it describes.
D.
The
Structure of Narrative Research
According to Labov, narratives can
be seen to be structured around the following six functional elements:
- The abstract,
summarises the point of the narrative.
- The orientation provides
information about the time, the place, the situation and the overall
setting for the narrative.
- The complicating
action provides details to do with the content, the sequence and
the focus of the narrative.
- The evaluation is
the narrator’s interpretation of the events of the narrative.
- The resolution,
describes the way in which the narrative works toward its conclusion and
how issues within it might be resolved.
- The coda is
designed to end the narrative by returning the listener to the present.
E.
Narrative
Research Techniques
Some
tschniques use in narrative research are:
1. Restorying
2. Narrative
analysis
3. Oral
history
4. Artifacts
5. Storytelling
6. Letter
writing
7. Autobiographical
and biographical writing
F.
Narrative Accounts of Research
The following list of narrative approaches is
by no means comprehensive but is intended to provide readers with a notion of
the possibilities open to them:
1. Autoethnography
Autoethnographies are accounts in which
writers/researchers tell stories about their own lived experiences, relating
these to broader contexts and understandings in much the same way as life
historians analyse life stories in the light of historical, sociological or/and
psychological theories and perspectives.
2. Ethnographic Fiction
Ethnographic fiction is a narrative form in which
fictional stories, which could be true, are told within an accurate
cultural/social framework
3. Poetry
Some writers use poetic forms to re-present
interview transcripts because they believe poetry comes closer to speech
patterns and rhythms: others chose it for its power to reflect emotions.
4. Performance ethnography
Performance ethnography is an attempt to re-present
an experience without losing the experience.
5. Mixed Genres
Mixed genre work can be considered as a form of
triangulation in which scholars take from literary, artistic and scientific
genre in order to try to give as rich a picture of the situation they are
concerned with as possible.
G. Writing
Narrative as a Method of Inquiry
Writing Narrative as a
method of inquiry offers an approach to narrative research that begins to look
into personal interpretations and feelings, nascent ideas and shows a
willingness to open up new ways of thinking and disrupting practices.
Richardson’s approach encourages the narrative researcher to engage in
practices that offers alternatives to the ‘prefabricated narratives that we use
to assemble the events of our lives’ (op cit). There are close parallels
with her methodology and the philosophical writing of Deleuze and what he sees
as the important creative role of concept making within it:
Such approaches to
narrative research practice talk of creativity: they are not to produce concepts in a congealed or fixed
sense, rather to create them as part of a process of nomadic inquiry and
narrative expression, so that creating concepts is performance. As we have
already seen for Deleuze the important notions of the ‘fold’ and ‘becoming’
talk of the narrative process of creating concepts in ways which are fluid;
opening and closing, folding and unfolding, never fixed, always being reflexive
about those representations that precede the creative process of
becoming. The following brief narrative is from a teacher beginning to
use writing (and talking) as methods of inquiry within the context of classroom
practices.
H. Narrative
interviewing
Narrative interviewing
is a research methodology, like so many others cited here, that Gubrium and
Holstein refer to as ‘postmodern’. We would argue that within the
somewhat ‘catch-all’ nature of the ‘postmodern’ descriptor, narrative
interviewing can be more aptly described as employing a post-structural
approach to research practice. So narrative interviewing has emerged not
only as a new methodology but also a critique of what Atkinson and Silverman
have referred to as the ‘interview society’.
In this society they claim that the interview
has discursively established itself as a neutral method of data collection,
producing trustworthy and accurate results within the context of a relationship
between interviewer and interviewee which is unbiased and fair. As
Fontana and Frey claim: ‘As a society we rely on the interview and by and large
take it for granted’. The popularity of the structured or semi-structured
interview as a preferred method of data collection can also be seen to reflect
the emergence of ‘evidence’ based practices in which the research being carried
out will be seen to have certain ‘outcomes’ which are themselves measurable and
conveniently susceptible to appropriate forms of ‘analysis’. Narrative
interviewing can be most concisely and succinctly described through the use of
the sub-heading to Fontana and Frey’s paper ‘The Interview: From Structured Questions to
Negotiated Texts’. It is within this title that we see the emergence of a
different methodological approach as well as a critique of a previous
form. The post structural flavour of this critique attempts to offer a
reflexive approach to the way in which interviews have traditionally been
represented.
CONCLUSION
That all writing is
narrative writing is widely accepted. However, in the context of research,
‘narrative’ is generally understood to refer to qualitative research that uses
and tells stories. Many people who use explicitly narrative approaches do so,
at least partly, out of a political conviction that social research should be
accessible and interesting. They believe that it should seek to capture
something of the sense of life as it is lived, and they want to avoid the
negative ethical and power consequences of assuming the sort of authoritative
voice that denies the possibility of multiple realities. Having said this it is
important to reiterate that it is only possible to re-present, not re-create
experiences, perceptions and emotions.
Researchers and writers
who want to go further in pushing the boundaries of what is regarded as
legitimate scholarship often experience tension between writing as they want to
and getting their work into the public domain. Bill Tierney’s suggestion that
we should refrain from the temptation of either placing our work in relation to
traditions or offering a defensive response. I increase my capacity neither for
understanding nor originality by a defensive posture. To seek new
epistemological and methodological avenues demands that we chart new paths
rather than constantly return to well-worn roads and point out that they will
not take us where we want to go.
REFERENCES
Stephen
E. Brock. Qualitative Research: Narrative
and Ethnographic Research. California State University, Sacramento.
http://www.edu.plymouth.ac.uk/resined/narrative/narrativehome.htm
0 comments:
Post a Comment