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Since
the 'turn to discourse' in research, narrative has taken a prominent
role in many different kinds of research. Narrative is conceptualised
and employed in many different ways in different kinds of research,
and I have been thinking about what a focus on
'narrative' means for my research. After all, perhaps I could replace
'narrative' with 'beliefs,' 'understandings,' 'perceptions,'
or 'thoughts'. What is the role that narrative
plays? Some of my recent reading has been helpful to distinguish the
various ways in which narrative is understood and employed in
research.
Narrative
as constructing experience
This
is where I started off in my thinking about narrative; thinking about
the importance of the stories that we tell ourselves. Stories are
powerful ways in which we make sense of our experience in the world
and construct our own identities. We create patterns and coherence
in what would otherwise be disparate and incoherent events and
experiences. The structures and forms of familiar cultural tales,
such as virtue being rewarded, can find their way into our personal
narratives, and might provide ways by which we link events together
in meaningful ways. These stories can become stories we live by, not
just retrospectively explaining our lives and experiences, but get used as a touchstone in our decision making. This
is the kind of narrative discussed by Jerome Bruner.
Narrative learning
Ivor Goodson and his colleagues in the Learning Lives project worked with the idea that narrative constructs experience, to look at how people learn from their narratives and through the act of constructing narratives. They described how different kinds of narrative had different levels of learning potential, and also different levels of action potential, the extent to which people were able to act on learning achieved from and through their narratives.
Narrative
as access to social worlds and inner workings
In
some research, narrative is recorded or elicited as a conduit to
understanding the inner reality of an individual – it is emphasised
that it is important that 'their voice' is heard on its own terms,
rather than being abstracted through statistical or other methods.
Their narratives are analysed to understand the social worlds they
inhabit and how they construct their own experiences. Narratives here
is 'data' that is collected to tell the researcher about aspects of
their participants' world they would otherwise be unable to study.
Narrative in society
Research
analysing narrative does not only look at what narrative tells us
about people and their social world, it can also look at how the
production of narrative is itself a social act. Narratives do not
'exist' out there on their own, but they are produced by particular
people, in particular situations, drawing on the particular
local and cultural resources available to them, for particular
purposes and with particular consequences. This kind of research
focuses on narrative as a social act and looks at what narratives do
in social contexts, rather than what narratives tell us
about individuals' experiences and social worlds. This kind of
research therefore take narrative as an object of study in its own
right and breaks down distinctions between 'discourse' and 'practice'.
This
kind of research is described as focusing on narrative practices in
everyday life by Gubrium and Holstein. It aims to deal with both the external and internal content of texts. In this way it
has some similarities with Fairclough's approach to discourse
analysis that sees discourse as the mediating between and part of the internal and external relations of text.
Narrative as a
method of research
Often
described as 'narrative inquiry', this is
a way of using narrative as a way of doing research. It sees
the process of research itself as a one of constructing a
narrative and is particularly interested in the researcher's involvement in this process. The output from
this kind of research may itself be in narrative – and fictional –
form. Rather than making any kind of verifiable claims about the experiences of
participants encountered in the research, research becomes an
opportunity for extended reflection on the part of the researcher and successful research
texts are ones that resonate with readers and prompt them to reflect
on their own experiences. Examples here are Peter Clough and Clandinin and Connelly.
If
the aim is to produce fictional narratives that allow us to reflect
on the nature of human experience, then it would seem that good literature already does this – and in many cases does it better –
than this kind of research. If the research texts produced are
drawn from researchers' reflections, are to be judged in terms of the
imaginative or emphathetic response they inspire in the reader and
cannot be held to account in terms of how 'truthfully' they represent their participants, then it is not clear to me what the 'research' is
adding that wouldn't be had better by reading Chekhov.
References:
- Bruner, J. (2004) Life as Narrative. Social Research 71 (3), 691-710.
- Clandinin, J. and Connelly, M. (2000) Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
- Clough, P. (2002) Narratives and Fictions in Educational Research. Buckingham, Open University Press
- Fairclough, N (2003) Analysing discourse: textual analysis for social research. London: Routledge.
- Goodson, I., Biesta, G. J. J., Tedder, M. and Adair, N. (2010) Narrative Learning. London: Routledge.
- Gubrium, J. F. and Holstein, J. A. (2009) Analyzing Narrative Reality. Los Angeles: Sage.
Image credit: ~ Phil Moore @ flickr
