Mastering Narrative Research: Unlocking the Power of Personal Stories for Your PhD Research
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Mastering Narrative Research
- A Focus on Lived Experience
- A Commitment to Storytelling
- Reflection and Narrative Analysis
- Practical Applications of Narrative Research for PhD Scholars
- Educational Research
- Exploring Personal Growth and Professional Identity
- Understanding Marginalised Voices
- The Evolution and Historical Development of Narrative Research
- Different Narrative Designs and Their Implications for PhD Research
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Introduction
Narrative research, a Qualitative research method, serves as an impactful research strategy for doctoral scholars who wish to understand individual experiences and lived realities. By centring research efforts around individual stories, you can access the richness of human experiences that reveal insights into lived realities. This article discusses features of narrative research and potential applications for PhD scholars, especially in educational contexts.
Key Characteristics of Narrative Research
Narrative inquiry is defined as studying, collecting and analysing people’s stories. It is more than telling a story. It is about understanding how people make sense of the world and structure meaning in their stories (Riessman, 1993).
1. A Focus on Lived Experience
Narrative inquiry is focused on experiences or the lived experiences of participants. Narrative inquiry is designed to investigate how people make meaning from and tell their stories, often through an in-depth or written story. Focusing on an individual and their story in qualitative data inquiry allows the scholar to understand the specific meanings people attach to certain events (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990).
For narrative researchers, instead of finding trends or abstract theories, narrative inquiry allows the researcher to uncover personal stories. This is particularly useful for studying teacher development, student experiences, and classroom practice, when a person’s story can provide an authentic lens.
2. A Commitment to Storytelling
Narrative research relies on storytelling as both the methodological approach and the means of data collection. It provides a sense of order, typically of time; time is one method that a narrative endeavour can use to order events from the participant’s lived experience. A narrative design can also be used in a nonlinear fashion, where stories are told in disorganisation and/or so that events don’t occur in chronological order. Nonlinear stories allow the story to be more dynamic and encapsulate more realities.
As it pertains to PhDs, this means that you have some latitude around narrative structure to interject or to evolve the complexity of the participant’s journey. You can break the participant’s journey and tell a simple chronological narrative, or you can disaggregate the experiences over time. Each method has a unique possibility (Cortazzi, 1993).
3. Reflection and Narrative Analysis
Reflection is central to narrative inquiry. The researcher does not merely collect the stories; they also reflect on how the stories were constructed and what certain stories might tell us about the participant’s perspective or worldview. A reflective stance requires us to interact with the data in some fashion, as scholars engage with thinking about the meaning of each story.
Self-reflection is especially helpful in the education context – not only to explore what happened but also to investigate why it happened and what meaning it held for the individual. This has implications for the movement to increase teacher reflection and professional development in educational research (Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach, & Zilber, 1998; Josselson & Lieblich, 1993).
Practical Applications of Narrative Research for PhD Scholars
Narrative research is especially well-suited to the study of singular experiences. It is also a strong research approach in fields such as education, psychology, social sciences, and health care, where human experience is situated and understanding is critical (Riessman, 1993). Here are some recommendations for practical uses for narrative research:
1. Educational Research
In educational contexts, narrative research can be used to study teacher professional development, student experiences, or educational reform. Researchers might ask teachers to tell stories about their teaching practices, or students to share stories about their learning experiences, to gain their understanding of the human elements of education that might be overlooked in the more traditionally quantitative research studies (McEwan & Egan, 1995).
Example: A PhD student might utilise narrative research to explore how teachers in one school district experienced changes in teaching practices over time, based on experiences they valued and embraced after forced educational policy changes dictating pedagogical practices. The experiences of teachers, when gathered in anecdotes, provide unique and genuine considerations of the barriers and progress toward practice change in policy implementation, as these stories provide a deeper understanding of the multi-layered nature of educational change (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990).
2. Exploring Personal Growth and Professional Identity
Narrative inquiry can also be used to explore the ways in which individuals develop their professional identities and undergo personal transitions. This type of investigation may be desirable because you are a PhD student exploring teacher education, professional learning, or career progression.
Example: A researcher might study the narratives of first-year teachers as they transition into the profession. The stories scholars gather from teachers will tell a detailed, textured account of their experiences with their initial struggles, successes, and how they shape their practice over a period. This kind of inquiry offers a solid, novelty factor, and a unique contribution to designing teacher educator programs or other development opportunities (McEwan & Egan, 1995).
3. Understanding Marginalised Voices
Narrative research can likewise be seen as an appropriate methodology to inquire into the experiences of marginalised groups, as it offers an opportunity to capture experiences of marginalised populations, otherwise omitted in conventional academic inquiries. Narrative research offers an opportunity to understand the lived realities of these participant groups, whether it is looking at the experiences of students who identify as members of marginalised groups, participating in groups of immigrant students, or studying the experiences of teachers who are also members of a largely underrepresented group (Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach, & Zilber, 1998).
Example: A study that looks at the experiences of refugee students in an urban high school, as a PhD scholar, you may collect and analyse personal narratives to understand how refugee students experience language barriers, cultural differences, and academic expectations.
Table 1: Practical Applications of Narrative Research for PhD Scholars
Application Area | Description | Example |
Educational Research | Investigates teacher development and student experiences. | Exploring how teachers adapt to policy changes by analysing their narratives of teaching practice evolution. |
Personal Growth & Professional Identity | Examines how individuals develop professional identities. | Studying first-year teachers’ stories about challenges and successes during their induction period. |
Understanding Marginalised Voices | Captures experiences of underrepresented or vulnerable groups. | Collecting refugee students’ narratives to understand language barriers and cultural adaptation in schools. |
The Evolution and Historical Development of Narrative Research
Narrative research has undergone substantial growth since its introduction in the early 1990s because of a “narrative turn” in fields such as literature, sociology, and education (Riessman, 1993). The narrative turn indicates that personal narratives would lead to essential understandings of human experience and offer a methodology that recognises the subjectivity of the lived experience.
In education, narrative research has had a significant impact in part due to the work of Connelly and Clandinin (1990), who provided a type of educational inquiry using narrative research through an emphasis on the stories of educators that could enhance teaching and the educational experience as a whole.
Additionally, narrative research has been advanced by life-story research, a methodology where researchers gather substantial personal narratives as the basis for studying the life course of individuals. Life-story methodology has enabled a deep and comprehensive understanding of the long-term influence of personal experiences on professional identity and development.
Different Narrative Designs and Their Implications for PhD Research
Narrative research is not a single approach per se, but rather a broad umbrella of designs and designs can be customised according to the research question or focus.
- Linear Narrative Design: This is the most common design and is a story told through a linear account; it pays special attention to the temporal sequencing of events and the time-based progression of experiences. This approach is best for research that intends to trace a particular development or change over time (Cortazzi, 1993).
- Nonlinear Narrative Design: This design takes a more fragmented approach; stories are not told as a strictly linear account of events. This is the best approach when exploring experiences that are more complex or do not lead naturally through time, such as trauma or memory.
- Interactive Narrative Design: In this approach, the researcher and participant collaborate to co-construct the narrative. It attends to how the researcher and participant each contribute to the narrative’s construction, producing a more dynamic and dialogic construction of narrative.
- Life-Story Research: This type of design specifically involves capturing and developing careful, rich life-stories from participants over a considerable period. It generates a sense of density about the lived experiences of each participant’s individual life story and reflects on how experiences have shaped a participant’s identity, beliefs, and actions.
Conclusion: The Value of Narrative Research for PhD Scholars
For PhD scholars, narrative research provides a strong methodology to investigate personal, lived experience. Narrative research allows researchers to move beyond abstract theories and portray the realities of individuals as they work through their own personal or professional worlds. Be it on teacher development with respect to offering students, or student experience, or the voices of those who are marginalised as research subjects, narrative research creates a context for deep reflection and personal insight.
As you begin your own narrative research, reflect upon the distinct possibilities this methodology offers:
- To engage with personal stories to connect with complex aspects of human experience.
- To design a narrative out of multiple narrative designs to guide your inquiring process.
- To consider how theory interacts with practice in a field like education, psychology, or social work, where personal stories can facilitate important change.
Narrative research can serve as a methodology for collecting stories, but for understanding the core of human experience, which is not only valuable but meaningful for doctoral researchers.
References
- Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1990). Stories of experience and narrative inquiry. Educational Researcher, 19(5), 2–14. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X019005002
- McEwan, H., & Egan, K. (1995). Narrative in teaching, learning, and research. Teachers College Press. https://sedl.org/pubs/pic02/picbib-output.cgi?searchuniqueid=22
- Riessman, C. K. (1993). Narrative analysis. Sage.
- Cortazzi, M. (1993). Narrative analysis. Falmer Press.
- Lieblich, A., Tuval-Mashiach, R., & Zilber, T. (1998). Narrative research: Reading, analysis, and interpretation. Sage.
Josselson, R., & Lieblich, A. (Eds.). (1993). The narrative study of lives (Vol. 1). Sage.