Discussing ethics issues, several of the contributors to this book state that, when they gave what they had written to their respondents to check, most did not finish reading the text because they found the writing boring. My reaction to this book was similar to that of said respondents—only I did not have the option of ceasing to read because I had agreed to do this review. Of course this tome, since it is a handbook, is probably not designed to be read from cover to cover. Using it as source book and reading individual chapters would make more sense.
The book is structured for maximum coverage. It begins with a history of the rise of narrative inquiry, situating it in the intellectual climate of the times. From this section we learn about the importance of John Dewey and also about the rise of narrative inquiry as a means of giving marginalized groups a voice. Much of the work presented here was done by people in the field of education and it seems that the emphasis on numbers in the study of educational outcomes has created a backlash that has led to a desire to hear what teachers and students think and feel. Education faculty, it seems, have discovered that talking to people can yield a richer and more nuanced picture than statistics alone.
Next comes a section that offers background. The articles here are not strictly about narrative inquiry, but provide a backdrop for it. Thus there is a piece on archival research and a chapter on autobiography. An entry on Lacanian psychoanalysis talks about the necessity of looking at what is not said, or what might be implied but not actually stated, when people describe their lives or particular events in them. An interesting piece on the "life path" discusses the concerns that are typical at various stages in a human life and the stories that they tend to prompt. There is an article on people sharing stories about teaching over many years. Articles also mention the artistic dimension of narrative and the use of the tools of literary analysis to understand what is being said. One article talks about the life story interview and its uses in fields such as gerontology, sociology, anthropology, religion, and education, among others.
The section that follows can be characterized as an exercise in application. The first piece talks about the use of narrative inquiry by various researchers, including the editor of this book. Then there is an article about photography, both images captured by students and those taken by the researcher, and using these to construct a story. One article explores the self as both researcher and as a person who constructs stories for both personal and academic purposes. An interesting article called "From Wilda to Disney" describes interviewing family members to reconstruct the narrative of a grandmother’s life and using similar techniques to study the history of the Disney corporation and its internal dynamics.
Section four is similar. There is a piece about elementary school teachers and another one about corporations, here focusing more on stories that arise about corporations than on narratives told among corporate employees. An interesting article tells how a physiotherapist involved a child in constructing a story and thus got her to exercise an arm that she was reluctant to use. An article about psychotherapy discusses the construction of life stories and their use in helping anorexics.
Section five discusses the difficulties of talking to people who speak or think differently from the researcher, specifically very small children and people from a different culture. Issues include what a story means to a child in kindergarten and what is considered proper or improper to include in narrative depending on the culture. The last contribution in this section talks about translating the narrative modes of a culture into academic speak. The author here is a member of the minority group struggling to convey the group’s issues to others.
The next section contains two articles: one discusses ethics and the other article examines ways of presenting something which is essentially oral on paper. The author of the latter piece suggests poetic and various visual means of capturing the dynamics of speech. The final section is also brief. One article talks about the future of narrative inquiry in an atmosphere where government funding demands "scientific," meaning numerical and repeatable, results. The other is a summary of interviews with important figures in the field of narrative inquiry.
So what is narrative inquiry as defined by this book and what are its issues? The best way to define narrative inquiry as it is used here is to equate it with what folklorists call personal narrative. It can be the story of an entire life, or it can be the story of a particular incident. One researcher, a man interviewed for the last chapter, stresses the artistic dimension of the type of narrative that is to be explored by the researcher and several of the articles talk about using literary techniques such as the examination of word choice in the research process. Sometimes, however, it seems that the authors use narrative to describe any talk. For them, narrative is what people say as opposed to information gathered through numbers-based surveys.
What are the issues of narrative inquiry? Ethics issues are discussed in a number of articles, not just the one specifically devoted to this topic. These are dilemmas that folklorists face as well. They include problems of establishing rapport and issues of maintaining or ending relations with one’s respondents. There are issues of confidentiality. Authors ask: what does one do when a child in a classroom unwittingly describes a home situation that borders on the illegal? The interpretive stance is an issue and contributors explore whether the academic should give his or her interpretation or allow the interviewee to determine what is written.
Much of the book talks about the narrative researcher as a member of academe and the problems that he or she faces. Contributors complain about ethics review boards and describe their difficulties in explaining what they do to such boards. They lament that colleagues do not take them seriously and do not consider the work that they do to be sufficiently rigorous and scientific. As noted earlier, the book is edited by a scholar in a school of education and much of the discussion is about narrative inquiry in education research. To my surprise, there is more about using teachers’ stories to understand teachers than using narrative to understand children and how educational policies affect them. For all the talk about the importance of narrative to understanding people and how they think and feel, there are precious few case studies, few actual stories told by real people. At the same time, what I remember from reading the 650 pages of this book are precisely such studies. This is proof that people’s stories are what matter. People’s stories are more powerful than academic writing, at least the sort of academic writing that the interviewees themselves do not want to read.
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[Review length: 1179 words • Review posted on May 26, 2011]