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Narrative Inquiry

Narrative inquiry is first and foremost a way of understanding experience. It is also a research methodology. It is, then, both a view of the phenomena of people's experiences and a methodology for narratively inquiring into experience and thus allows for the intimate study of individuals' experiences over time and in context. Beginning with a narrative view of experience, researchers attend to place, temporality, and sociality, from within a methodological three-dimensional narrative inquiry space that allows for inquiry into both researchers' and participants' storied life experiences. Within this space, each story told and lived is situated and understood within larger cultural, social, and institutional narratives. Narrative inquiry is marked by its emphasis on relational engagement between researcher and research participants. Narrative inquiry, across various disciplines and multiple professional fields, aims at understanding and making meaning of experience through conversations, dialogue, and participation in the ongoing lives of research participants. Each discipline and field of study brings slightly different ways of understanding and different contexts to the narrative study of experience that deepen the methodology of narrative inquiry.

The introduction of narrative inquiry as a research methodology has reshaped the field of qualitative research, especially with its close attention to experience as a narrative phenomenon and its emphasis on relational engagement that places relational ethics at the heart of inquiry. This entry reviews the process of narrative inquiry and its philosophical foundations, describes the creation of field and research texts, and explores ethical issues that are raised with this methodology.

Narrative in Qualitative Research

Over the past 2 decades, researchers have taken a narrative turn to understanding experience. Although there is a history of narrative work within the traditions of narratology, in the 1990s researchers began to specifically develop a research methodology called narrative inquiry. Narrative inquiry and narrative research, terms used almost interchangeably in the current research literature, signify a research methodology. However, within the broad field of qualitative research, there are many analytic methods or forms of narrative analysis. Some forms of narrative analysis are used as methods within other qualitative research methodologies.

In studying and understanding experience narratively, researchers recognize the centrality of relationships, the relationships among participants and researchers, and the relationships of experiences studied through and over time and in unique places and multilayered contexts. Amidst these relationships, participants relate and live through stories that speak of and to their experiences of living. The process of narrative inquiry is composed of engaging with participants in the field, creating field texts, and writing both interim and final research texts. Throughout this process, ethical considerations require that researchers remain attentive to ethical tensions, obligations, and responsibilities in their relationships with participants.

Philosophical Underpinnings

John Dewey's theory of experience is most often cited as the philosophical underpinning of narrative inquiry. Dewey's two criteria of experience, interaction and continuity enacted in situations, provide the grounding for attending to experience through the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space with dimensions of temporality, place, and sociality. Jerome Bruner's ideas about paradigmatic and narrative knowing in psychology, David Carr's ideas about the narrative structure and coherence of lives in philosophy, Mary Catherine Bateson's ideas about continuity and improvisation as a response to the uncertainties in life contexts in anthropology, and Robert Coles's ideas about narrative in life and teaching practice in medicine also provide a philosophical base for narrative inquiry. As narrative inquirers seek to inquire into experience, they must begin their inquiries with narrative self-studies into their own experiences. Narrative inquiries, thus, have both autobiographical narrative groundings as well as more theoretical groundings. The autobiographical narrative inquiries are the starting points for initially shaping and deepening the research puzzle.

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