How is 'narrative' used in research?

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