Narrative Inquiry

Listening for Peoples’ Stories

Narrative inquiry involves listening (or looking) for peoples’ stories. Whether this is in casual or formal conversation; in a group meeting or in a focus group; in a structured, semi-structured or ‘narrative’ interview; in biographical research or drawn from diaries, letters or other kinds of documentation, it seems clear that people are constantly immersed in narrative. Narrative is a portal to human thinking. People use stories to explain their own and others’ past actions, provide a commentary on current activities and anticipate the possibilities of future events. Stories are imaginative and world making, bringing order and meaning to everyday experience and can be unsettling and disrupting as well. Stories need to be told. People tell their stories to reveal their feelings and concerns, to make a point, to entertain, to fulfil social demands, to fit in with what is expected and/or to challenge the status quo. In stories, people become engaged in creating a sense of identity both in the stories that they choose to tell as well as in the way they tell these stories. Frank has suggested, ‘The capacity of stories is to allow us humans to be’.

Narrative Thinking

Narrative inquiry is much more than simply collecting stories. To appreciate its full scope, it is necessary to appreciate that people are not merely telling stories but are actively participating in narrative thinking to make sense of their world. This narrative thinking organizes material events and human actions into sequential structures coded spatially and temporally, and at the same time, it adds colour, perspective and emphasis that effectively code human concern. The spoken and written narratives that stem from this thinking provide an efficient basis for the sharing of human knowledge and experience, as well as for establishing human self-identity. The philosopher Paul Ricoeur has remarked that in a society where narrative has died, its people would no longer be able to exchange their experiences.

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