Cynthia James’s Reviews > Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research > Status Update

in narrative inquiry, the researcher tends to be at the other end of the continuum, from the controlled-plot hypothesis tester (p.76)

One of the hobbies of the critics of narrative inquiry often seems to be making the claim of co-optation of voice. The argument may run either that voices are heard, stolen and published as the researcher's own or that the researcher's voice drowns out the participants' voices, so that when participants do appear to speak it is, after all, the researcher's voice code." (p. 75)

"One of the methodological principles we were taught in quantitative analysis courses was to specify hypotheses to be tested in research. It does not work like that in narrative inquiry. The purposes, & what one is exploring & find puzzling, change as the research progresses. This happens from day to day & week to week, & it happens over the long haul as narratives a retold, puzzles shift, and purposes change" (p.73)

"within the inquiry field, we lived our stories, told stories of those experiences, and modified them by retelling them & reliving them" (p. 71).

"when researchers enter the field, they experience shifts and changes, constantly negotiating, constantly reevaluating, and maintaining flexibility and openness to an ever-changing landscape" (p. 71)

As we begin work on a research project, we are beginning a new story (Conelly & Clandinin, 1990). "difficult as it may be to tell a story, the more difficult but important task is the retelling of stories that allow for growth & change" (p. 71)

"What do narrative inquirers do? They make themselves aware as possible of the many, layered narratives at work in their inquiry space. They imagine narrative intersections, and they anticipate possible narrative threads emerging" (p. 70)

"acknowledging the centrality of the researcher's own experience - the researcher's own livings, tellings, retellings, relivings" (p. 70).

"This too is one of the things that narrative inquirers do in the field: they settle in, live & work alongside participants, and come to experience not only what can be seen and talked about directly but also the things not said & not done that shape the narrative structure of their own observations an their talking" (pp. 67-68).

"This too is one of the things that narrative inquirers do in the field: they settle in, live & work alongside participants, and come to experience not only what can be seen and talked about directly but also the things not said & not done that shape the narrative structure of their own observations an their talking" (pp. 67-68).

"This too is one of the things that narrative inquirers do in the field: they settle in, live & work alongside participants, and come to experience not only what can be seen and talked about directly but also the things not said & not done that shape the narrative structure of their own observations an their talking" (pp. 66-68).