Chapter 4: Qualitative Approaches to Inquiry and Narrative Research

Narrative Research

• Definition: collects stories from individuals to understand their experiences and identities
• Layers: story, interpretation of participant, and interpretation of researcher
• Focuses on phenomenon or method, with a chronological connection
• Postmodern orientation, human development, psychology, sociology, and quantitative/qualitative approaches
• Defining features:
  • Collects stories, which may be collaborative or co-constructed
  • Tells individual experiences and identities
  • Stories occur within specific places or situations, with temporality being important
  • Uses various forms of data, analyzed thematically, dialogically, structurally, or using visual analysis
  • Shapes into a chronology, with turning points (tensions or interruptions)
• Types:
  • Biographical study
  • Autoethnography (larger cultural meaning)
  • Life history (portrays individual's entire life)
  • Oral history (from one or several people, with testimonies)
• Procedures:
  • Determine suitability of design
  • Select one or more participants
  • Consider shape of data collection/recording
  • Collect information about context
  • Analyze participant's stories
  • Collaborate with participants
  • Present narrative in written form
• Collaborative relationships: active involvement of the participant, with epiphanies (turning points, disruptions in the story)
• Challenges:
  • Clearly understanding participant's life context within social, familial, linguistic, institutional dimensions
  • Looking for multilayered context of a life
  • Reflecting on own personal/political background
  • Considering who owns the story

Phenomenological Research

• Definition: focuses on understanding human experiences from the perspective of individuals experiencing them
• Focuses on understanding human existence, providing a deeper understanding of how individuals perceive and make sense of their world
• Qualitative research approach that seeks to understand and describe the universal essence of a phenomenon
• Studies lived experiences to gain deeper insights into how people understand those experiences
• Assumptions: people use a universal structure or essence to make sense of their experience
• Defining features:
  • Single concept or idea
  • Heterogenous group of participants
  • Philosophical discussion
  • Researcher brackets self
  • Data collection: typically interviews
  • Data analysis: narrowing units to broader meaning units, seeking essence of what and how experiences
• Types:
  • Hermeneutical phenomenology (lived experience interpreting texts of life)
  • Transcendental or psychological phenomenology (epoche or bracketing for fresh perspective)
• Philosophical component: role of philosophy as search for wisdom, suspending judgment about what is real until founded, intentionality of consciousness, and refusing subject-object dichotomy