Narrative Research

Philosophical Origins

Philosophically, John Dewey’s theory of experience is often cited as foundational to narrative research, as that theory supplies the rationale for approaching narrative through the three constructs of time, place, and social context. However, the theoretical work of numerous scholars and philosophers inform narrative researchers, including Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jerome Bruner, Clifford Geertz, and many others. Narrative research is situated within the reform movement that, beginning in the 1970s, posited that important aspects of personal and social experiences were inaccessible via conventional research methods. By the 1990s, the term narrative inquiry was being used in a variety of disciplines to describe methodology that used storytelling as the primary unit of analysis. Generally speaking, it can be said that four fundamental philosophic orientations are characteristic of narrative inquiry: the belief in the importance of the relationship between researcher and subject as a critical factor in research, a belief in the power of words (as [Page 1128]opposed to numbers) to uncover knowledge, a belief that specific experiences have the ability to expose larger truths, and a belief that there are more ways of knowing than are generally accepted by traditional positivist research orientations.

Approaches to Narrative Research

There is not one universally accepted definition of the term narrative, as it tends to be interpreted differently depending on the discipline and needs of the researcher. A narrative unit can, for example, be a story told through a series of structured interviews, or it may be a story culled through hundreds of hours of observations. Written documents, transcripts of conversations, and visual artifacts may also be part of the research. Similarly, there is no single widely accepted way to go about conducting narrative research. This lack of doctrine may be both freeing and confusing to novice researchers. Usually in narrative inquiry, the research puzzle is approached by obtaining narratives from participants and then using thematic analysis, discourse analysis, or other similar analytical frameworks. Themes are explored with the understanding that people and their contexts are not fixed and that there is not one “true” representation of reality. Rather, narrative researchers assume that there are multiple and often conflicting truths at work in any story and that even the telling of a story may sincerely alter it.

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