Abstract

Stories and storytelling are central to human experience and understanding. Narrative understanding is an innate human capacity; we think, live, and dream in story form, making it one of the principal forms of human meaning-making. Story and narrative provide a substantial (if unspoken) foundation to many of the existing qualitative methodologies in use today, including ethnography, narrative inquiry, self-study, autoethnography, grounded theory, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. The entry emphasizes narrative in our lives, as well as the incompatibility of prescriptive methods with the foundational ethos of the storytelling-as-research methodology.