Narrative Research

Epistemological Grounding

The epistemological grounding for narrative research is on a continuum of postmodern philosophical ideas in that there is a respect for the relativity and multiplicity of truth in regard to the human sciences. Narrative researchers rely on the epistemological arguments of such philosophers as Paul Ricoeur, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Wilhelm Dilthey, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Although narrative researchers differ in their view of the possibility of objectively conceived “reality,” most agree with Donald Spence's distinction between narrative and historical truth. Factuality is of less interest than how events are understood and organized, and all knowledge is presumed to be socially constructed.

Ricoeur, in his seminal work Time and Narrative, argues that time is organized and experienced narratively; narratives bring order and meaning to the constantly changing flux. In its simplest form, our experience is internally ordered as “this happened, then that happened” with some (often causal) connecting link in between. Narrative is also central to how we conceive of ourselves; we create stories of ourselves to connect our actions, mark our identity, and distinguish ourselves from others.

Questions about how people construct themselves and others in various contexts, under various conditions, are the focus of narrative research. Narrative research paradigms, in contrast to hypothesis-testing ones, have as their aims describing and understanding rather than measuring and predicting, focusing on meaning rather than causation and frequency, interpretation rather than statistical analysis, and recognizing the importance of [Page 870]language and discourse rather than reduction to numerical representation. These approaches are holistic rather than atomistic, concern themselves with particularity rather than universals, are interested in the cultural context rather than trying to be context-free, and give overarching significance to subjectivity rather than questing for some kind of objectivity.

Narrative research orients itself toward understanding human complexity, especially in those cases where the many variables that contribute to human life cannot be controlled. Narrative research aims to take into account—and interpretively account for—the multiple perspectives of both the researched and researcher.

Jerome Bruner has most championed the legitimization of what he calls “narrative modes of knowing,” which privileges the particulars of lived experience rather than constructs about variables and classes. It aims for the understanding of lives in context rather than through a prefigured and narrowing lens. Meaning is not inherent in an act or experience but is constructed through social discourse. Meaning is generated by the linkages the participant makes between aspects of the life he or she is living and by the explicit linkages the researcher makes between this understanding and interpretation, which is meaning constructed at another level of analysis.

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