Narrative inquiry as a research methodology in education and health promotion

Narrative Inquiry

The work of Riley and Hawe (2005) entitled: "Researching Practice: The Methodological Case for Narrative Inquiry" reports that there has been an increased in research interest in the analysis of stories "as researcher in many disciplines endeavor to see the world through the eyes of others." (p.1) Narrative inquiry is described as "a unique means to get inside the world of health promotion practice." (Riley and Hawe, 2005, p.1) However, narrative inquiry is used in many fields and disciplines and is most prevalently utilized in educational research.

Narrative inquiry is stated by Riley and Hawe (2005) to be used in the examination of "...the way a story is told by considering the positioning of the actor/storyteller, the endpoints, the supporting cast, the sequencing and tension created by the revelation of some events, in preference to others." (2005, p.1) Narrative methods additionally serve to provide "special insights into the complexity of community intervention implementation over and above more familiar research methods." (Riley and Hawe, 2005, p.1)

II. History of Narrative Inquiry

Riley and Hawe report that the history of narrative inquiry is one that that is long and that has a "strong and contested tradition" and as well there are "a range of approaches to narrative inquiry." (2005, p.1) Riley and Haw additionally state that the words 'story' and 'narrative' are "often used interchangeably, but they are analytically different." (Riley and Hawe, 2005, p.1) The difference is stated to be in relation to 'where the primary data ends and where the analysis of that data begins.' (Riley and Hawe, 2005, p.1) The role of the researcher is to interpret the stories told and to conduct analysis of the "underlying narrative that the storytellers may not be able to give voice to themselves." (Riley and Hawe, 2005, p.1)

III. Narrative Inquiry as a Research Method

The work of Webster and Mertova (2007) entitled: "Using Narrative Inquiry as a Research Method: An Introduction to Using Critical Event Narrative Analysis in Research on Teaching and Learning" states that the "identification of key players and events assists in setting the background to rise of the popularity of narrative inquiry in contemporary research." (2007, p. 7) The term narrative inquiry is reported to have first been used by "Canadian researchers Connelly and Clandinin (1990) to describe an already developing approach to teacher education that focused on personal storytelling." (Webster and Mertova, 2007, p.7)

It is claimed by Connelly and Clandinin that "what we know in education comes from telling each other stories of educational experience. So narrative inquiry is concerned with analyzing and criticizing the stories we hear, tell and read in the course of work." (p.7) The work of Wilson (2007) entitled: "Combining Historical Research and Narrative Inquiry to Create Chronicles and Narratives" reports the statement of Cresswell (1998) who "invited us to consider the following contributions of a quantitative study" and stated "Besides dialogue and understanding a qualitative study may fill a void in existing literature, establish a new line of thinking or assess an issue with an understudied group or population." (p.94 in Wilson, 2007, p.23)

Merriam (1998) stated justification for using the case study design in the statement of: "To gain an in-depth understanding of the situation and meaning for those involved. The interest is in process rather than outcomes, in context rather than a specific variable, in discovery rather than confirmation. Insights gleaned from case studies can directly influence policy, practice, and future research. (p. 19 cited in Wilson, 2007)

Kramp (2004) stated of the narrative inquiry methodology that "Each story has a point-of-view that will differ, depending on who is telling the story, who is being told, as well as when and where the story is told. Consequently, verisimilitude -- the appearance or likelihood that something is or could be true or real-is a more appropriate criterion for narrative knowing than verification or proof of truth. (p. 108)

Kramp additionally stated that "narrative inquiry serves the researcher who wishes to understand a phenomenon or an experience rather than to formulate a logical or scientific explanation. The object of narrative inquiry is understanding." (p.104) It is suggested by Clandinin and Connelly (2000) that the "narrative is the best way of representing and understanding experience...narrative is both the phenomenon and the method of the social sciences." (p.18 in Wilson, 2007)

The work of Reid and Robertson (nd) entitled: "Weird Yet Wonderful: The Potential of Narrative Inquiry in Leisure Research" states that narrative research in the form of "Exploring lived experiences, as relayed through personal stories could enable researchers to understand unique aspects of leisure. Living, then telling stories, and reliving experiences through retelling stories arguably provides insight into quality of life. Narrative inquiry is about understanding lived experience, facilitated through interaction between the participants and the research in a particular context. Rather than the researcher remaining separate from the information they are gathering in order to maintain objectivity, the relationship of the researcher to the topic is at the heart of narrative inquiry." (Reid and Robertson, nd, p.1)

The work of Clandinin and Connelly entitled: "Narrative and Story in Practice and Research" states that narrative "comes to an essay on method as something of a pretender..." And "unlike most topics discussed under the rubric of method, narrative or story if one wishes to be modest and unpretentious. Whatever may be said about narrative as 'method' follows from its character as a phenomenon." (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000, p.1) Clandinin and Connelly state that in their experience that their imagination "has been captured by the possibility of studying experience rather than using experience as a contextual given for educational discourse." (2000, p. 3)

Clandinin and Connelly state that they further have noticed "that when experience moves in from the contextual shadows and becomes more central to theorizing and to altering practice, it often comes under a kind of suspicious criticism. From the point-of-view of inquiry, it may bee seen as a term that violates many researchers' notions of academic appropriateness." (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000, p.4) Clandinin and Connelly state that one "ideological objection is essentially sociological and critical in origin and roughly speaking comes from the view that social organization and structure rather than people and experience are the appropriate starting points for educational inquiry." (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000, p.4) Also argued is that "experience is too comprehensive, too wholistic and therefore an insufficiently analytic term to permit useful inquiry." (Clandinin and Connelly, p.4)

Clandinin and Connelly address the issue of 'Time' and states that time "like experience and the ether of yesteryear, is everywhere about us, yet for the most part remains invisible to an inquiring mind." (p.7) The reason that this form of educational inquiry failed is attributed by Clandinin and Connelly to be due to the "reductionism imposed by the technical rational logic of the time-on-task literature." (p.7) Clandinin and Connelly state that the relationship of past and future "may be more or less passive or active; more or less an experiential 'undergoing' or a 'trying'." (2000, p.7) Stated to be the central significance of the study of narrative inquiry is that the study of experience "as a figure is simultaneously the study of time as a figure as they go together as one." (Clandinin and Connelly, 2007, p.7)

IV. Dewey on Narrative Inquiry

Dewey expressed the idea of time in the notion of "continuity" which is one of the two criteria of experience stated by Dewey and which is a reference to the "succession of situations within which experience occurs. Without continuity, there is no such thing as experience." (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000, p.8) Experience "is what it is, in part, because of what is brought to it, via prior experience, and, in part, because of its influence on the future brought about by the alternations that occur in what Dewey calls the internal and environmental conditions of an experience." (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000, p.8) Clandinin and Connelly state that there is "more to the idea of time in Dewey than a first reading of continuity might suggest, that is, a suggestion of an endless sequence of experiences." (2000, p.8)

Kermode (1966) is stated to have utilize the "tick-tock" metaphor "of the clock to demonstrate his idea of the elementary temporal plot structure of narrative" and in 1934 Dewey is stated to have further developed this metaphor in demonstrating how time "while having the quality of continuity, was experienced cyclically and thematically." (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000, p.8) Clandinin and Connelly state that cyclic repetition "is one of the bases for rhythm and it is in rhythm that 'there is a sudden magic that gives us a sense of inner revelation brought to us about something we have supposed to be known through and through." (Dewey, 1934, pp. 170-171 cited in: Clandinin and Connelly, 2000, p.8)

It is concluded by Clandinin and Connelly that time "...far from being the untouchable background ether in which we were once thought to live, is part of the criterial definition of experience and is one of those foreground matters that conveys both magic and meaning in the study of educational experience. Keeping the continuous, cycle and rhythmic sense of time before us is another task we have come to associate with the study of narrative." (2000, p. 8)

VI. Process of Narrative Inquiry

The process of narrative inquiry is characterized by "movement from experience to researcher and practitioner field notes, transcripts, documents and descriptive storying of the experienced narrative, to a mutual reconstruction of a narrative account..." (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000, p.11) Clandinin and Connelly, 2000, p.10 state that it should be clear that the narrative inquiry process is "not a linear one, there is data collection and further narrative reconstruction. The narrative inquiry process itself is a narrative one of storying, restorying, and restorying again." (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000, p.11)

Narrative inquiry generally does not begin with a problem being prespecified and a set of hypotheses and instead they tend to begin "with an interest in a particular phenomenon which could be understood narratively, such as teachers' personally held instruction knowledge in the work of Elbaz (1982, 1983)..." (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000, p.11) The work of Nah (nd) relates that the 'umbrella of narrative inquiry' is that which is illustrated in the following labeled Figure 1.

Figure 1

The Umbrella of Narrative Inquiry

Source: Nah (nd)

Clandinin and Connelly (2000) report that in the construction of narrative accounts "ways of telling an individual's story as embedded within particular cultures and histories are offered. Accounts of how the individual is shaped by the larger professional knowledge context and also the ways in which the professional knowledge context has been reshaped in the unique situation in which the individual lives and the works are constructed. In narrative inquiry the individual is shaped by the situation and shapes the situation in the living out of the story and in the storying of the experience." (p. 14)

It is held by Clandinin and Connelly (2000) that these interpretations are offered since "because one of the main functions of research from a narrativist point-of-view is to foster reflection and restorying on the part of participants. The first and central contribution lies in the interactive relations between practitioner and researcher which leads to a mutual, collaborative telling and retelling of the participants, both practitioner and researcher stories." (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000, p.14)

VII. Writing the Narrative Inquiry Report

Narratives are written by researchers for "a larger audience than their participants..." Or that of themselves and other practitioners. (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000, p.15) Clandinin and Connelly state that the question "of rendering an account for the larger audience raises issues around the ways in which researchers should write accounts of narrative inquiry and the ways in which such accounts should be read. Part of the concern in narrative inquiry is with audience..." therefore the narrative researcher needs to "concern themselves with issues of representation and audience." (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000, p.14)

As the narrative research account is read, "the intent is to foster reflection, storying and restorying for them. Other narrative researchers such as Rose (1983) share similar purposes in writing for a larger audience" and specifically the intent of Rose is stated to be that "the work as a whole will suggest new truths especially the extent to which all living is a creative act of greater or less authenticity, hindered or helped by the fictions to which we submit ourselves." (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000, p.14)

When one reads a narrative they are drawn into the story and they "find a place or way of seeing through participating in the story." (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000, p.17) The completeness of a story is stated to lie within the "immediacy and which narrative is able to render the concrete particularities of experience." (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000, p.17) The narrative form is important in that the "aesthetically reproduces the temporal tensions of experience, a moving present tensed between and every moment embracing a memory of what has gone before and an activity projected underway." (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000, p.17)

Summary

Narrative inquiry involves the recording through use of journals, notes, transcripts recordings and other methods of keeping records the story, and restorying of the participants in the research case study. The narrative form of research is a methodology that examines the experiential data produced through the narrative and reporting of participants and is a method that is considered most appropriate in attempting to understand phenomenon on a social level in the research study initiative.