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After our seventh session
Posted 4 years ago, 4 comments
Following our readings of ethnography and action research, we're looking at another approach: narrative inquiry. I've put the readings up on the Schedule page.
Please post your questions/comments/reactions to the readings by 3pm on Monday.
I've met with seven people who are planning to write/share something. If you are planning to write a paper (expected with for-credit participants), please email so we can set up a time to meet before the session on Monday.
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Clandinin, Chapter 4, What do narrative inquirers do:
- seems a little weasel-y... how can one discuss narrative research without narrative?
- are they saying in here "we don't care about narrative in general, but narrative research is the recording and interpretation of experiential data"?
- is the going definition (or model) then "situated exploration of interactions over time"?
- to what extent is the story of the researcher part of the result? whose story is being told? and to whom does the final story belong?
- are we "complicity in the world we study" implicitly or explicitly?
- is it the job of the researcher to synthesize the third dimension? how sparse or thorough must this reconstruction be?
- are we dealing with the metaphorical "hanging chad" in the cases where the researcher backfills memories?
- are memories temporally correct? need they be?
Clandinin, Chapter 6, From field to field texts:
- "the best way" -- a big claim...
- in any ethnographic enquiry, the observer is the instrument. how is this different in narrative inquiry?
- even if the inquirer is fully involved, all experience stands separated by context of the lives they occur in. how does the researcher get close enough? when is he or she too far? how does anyone know? what is missed and when is it important? how is this recorded?
- what sort of a human being slip in and out of their social personas like changing into pajamas for bed?
- taking field notes seem like an arbitrary marker. what if the notes are simply contaminated by implicit knowledge? how do you watch out for it?
- how often does the narrative of the inquiry not match the mental landscape of the participant? what do you do?
- how detailed must field notes be to be able to recreate mental state? how do you interpret your interpretation without your own mental state data? when can you presume that the state is equivalent?
- are there narrative investigators with the memory of a goldfish (like me)?
- is narrative inquiry a very active form of lived experience record?
- what is the primary distinguishing reason to use narrative inquiry over other forms?
- are temporal nonlinearities a form of triangulation?
In reading the papers on narrative inquiry techniques I felt that it was an approach somewhere in between ethnography and action research. Like action research it asks the researcher to loss themselves in the event taking place, but by taking frequent notes and going back to those notes the researcher can shift back and forth between being engrossed in the event and being "objective."
I thought it was interesting in the Creswell reading that they state how the narrative approach is "always interpretive" and how no two people would record the events the same. Despite this, he argues that narrative inquiry does not regress into relativism because the process and records of note taking provides a means or body of data to be more objective about.
Creswell, Narrative research:
- what's so special about narrative as the subject of study (ie, why is it mentioned in particular)?
- is narrative research a restricted enthnography?
- when using different approaches, is this an example of lenses?
- can autobiographical research be considered externally valid? is the narrative being researched different from the narrative being produced? how is it different from an autobiography in general? (what's the rigor?)
- is most narrative research done over a temporally-long corpus?
- is restorying objective? how subjective can it be? how is the validity of the restorying evaluated?
- all the questions at the end of the section, particularly about onership. who does own the outcome? what's the role of the subject? can this be participatory without being autobiographical? what are the general validity criteria?