List of Acronyms
Chapter 2: Research methodology
2.3 Research method
Many of the emancipatory research paradigms which have emerged in the last four decades have argued for particular research methods as well as a particular (emancipatory) approach.
In particular, qualitative methods are held to be more appropriate than quantitative, and qualitative methods (in-depth/open-ended interviews and questionnaires, focus groups, and participatory research methods) have become increasingly popular, with interpretive
research, neo-Marxist critical theory, phenomenology, ethnography, cultural studies, action research and feminist research all contributing to the development of such methods (Hake, 1999, p.137).
There is something of a debate about the extent to which particular research methods and methodologies are in and of themselves ideological - i.e. pertain to a particular paradigm or theoretical framework. Thus Harvey (1990), for example, argues that “while some methods
lend themselves more readily to certain epistemological perspectives, no method of data collection is inherently positivist, phenomenological or critical” (p.1), Kirby and McKenna (1989) assert the opposite:
While some researchers may argue that research methodologies are like a set of tools from which you can pick or choose depending on the circumstances, we believe that different methodologies carry with them specific underlying assumptions which will shape the way information is gathered and the kind of knowledge created. (p.26)
If Kirby and McKenna are correct, then choosing a particular method can be fraught with problems, particularly because certain methods become popular at certain times, and are in and of themselves interesting and alluring, as Clandinin and Connelly (2000) report was their own experience:
....we had to fight against an urge to lose ourselves in the wonders and complexities of the various methods. There was a kind of seductiveness that threatened to wrap us into the ideas and concepts that drove the method. It was difficult to keep before us our research puzzles about experience when the methods seemed to interesting in their own right. (p.128)
Lather (1986) argues that within emancipatory research, methods need to be empowering, or at least non-alienating. She contrasts this with what Reinharz (1979, cited in Lather, 1986) calls the ‘rape model’ of research, whereby social scientists advance their careers using alienating and exploitative methods. However, to some extent at least, the impact and effect of a method depends on how you use it; and the “major ontological differences within the broader field of qualitative inquiry” (Elliott, 2005, p.116) (as discussed above) have a major impact on how methods are used. Just as it is possible to look at a critical issue in a way that is not critical, one can use a critical method in a way that is not (Harvey, 1990); and, as Elliott (2005) argues, there’s no inherent reason why qualitative methods should be less exploitative that quantitative.
I have chosen to use a qualitative approach because it allows for a more in-depth
understanding of social processes over time, closer scrutiny of the relationship between the individual and society, and greater exploration of people’s own understanding of this, than quantitative methods allows (Babbie, 2004). However, as suggested above, I have been mindful of the possibility that such an approach can be used in ways are that exploitative; i.e.
inconsistent with my own political position, and have thus endeavoured to avoid or overcome the possible contradictions. This has been particularly the case in applying my chosen
method: narrative inquiry.
2.3.1 The narrative or life history method
The narrative or life history method has become an increasingly popular method within qualitative research (although it has also been widely used within a quantitative frame) (Elliott, 2005) since the mid-1980s.
A narrative is a story, an arranging of a sequence of events into a whole, showing the connection between them. There are three main features of narrative:
1. Temporality, that is it happens at a particular time, or over time; it is time-bound;
2. Causality (what happened and what caused it to happen), often referred to as the plot;
3. Interpretation or evaluation of the events narrated, by the teller and the listener.
Narratives also happen within a particular social context - someone tells the story, for a reason, under certain circumstances, to someone else. Stories are also told from a particular point of view/perspective, called positionality. So stories are always told under particular social conditions and constraints; they are a social transaction between teller and listener (Davis, 2002). Stories may simply reflect society, but there are also ‘counternarratives’
(Steinmetz, 1992 cited in Davis, 2002), or what Ewick and Silbey (1995, cited in Davis 2002) call “subversive stories’ - stories against or as alternatives to dominant social narratives.
These key features - temporality, causality, evaluation, poisitionality and situatedness - are what make narrative inquiry an interesting and useful research method, and one which is particularly suited to my study.
The ability of narrative to reveal what has happened over time allows researchers to consider processes and change over time (Elliott, 2005). One’s understanding of people and events changes, and narrative can capture the temporal nature of experience and analysis (Webster
& Mertova, 2007). Webster and Mertova (2007) suggest that “Narrative is well suited to addressing the complexities and subtleties of human experience in teaching and learning”
(Webster & Mertova, 2007, p.1). They point out that learning is a change process that happens over time, so using a method that can deal with this is important. “[The] subtle connection with construction of knowledge through experience allows narrative to be
associated as a tool of research in conjunction with contemporary learning theories” (Webster
& Mertova, 2007, p.20).
Temporality links to causality and evaluation: “Stories are a reflection of the fact that experience is a matter of growth, and that understandings are continually developed,
reshaped and retold” (Webster & Mertova, 2007, p.13). Webster and Mertova cite Dewey as saying that narrative is an avenue into human consciousness. In telling a story, people select some events, and leave out others. Some events are given prominence. The events are put into some kind of order or “plot”. “Plot transforms a mere succession of events into a configuration” (Davis, 2002, p.14). Stories thus document the innermost experience of individuals, including how they interpret, understand and define the world around them:
In stories...the meaning of events is created by showing their temporal or causal relationship to other events within the whole narrative and by showing the role such events play in the unfolding of the larger whole...The order and position of an event within a story explains how and why it happened. (Davis, 2002, p.13)
Thus a critical feature of narratives is that they impose meaning on events and experience (Elliot, 2005); as Polkinghorne (1988, quoted in Davis, 2000) says, narrative is “the primary form by which human experience is made meaningful” (p.1). So narratives are a useful method for gathering information about lived experience and about “the meaning given to the experiences by those participants” (Trahar, 2006, p.15). Narrative research “allows us to see lives as simultaneously individual and social creations, and to see individuals simultaneously
Thus the method can focus on the individual, and (too) often does; but it can equally focus on power and ideology.
Many writers have suggested that narrative is particularly useful in gathering the experiences and meanings given to these experiences of those who are often left out of research; i.e. it can focus on the stories of “those whose voices might otherwise go unheard or unnoticed”
(Cortazzi & Jin, 2006, p.28). In fact, as Elliot (2005) has argued, a desire to empower
research participants, and allow them to contribute to determining the most salient themes of the research, is a common theme in research using this approach, as is an interest in self and representations of self (particularly so within the deconstructivist approach), and an
awareness that the researcher is also a narrator.
This emphasis within narrative inquiry, on allowing participants the opportunity to
participate in framing the research uncommon in many other research methods, and being consciously reflexive as researcher, has a crucial effect on shifting power relations within research and potentially on the possibility of social change. Watson (2006), for example, looks at how indigenous people in New Zealand have used the method to actively reclaim their right to conduct their own research, ‘regarding the dominance of white researchers as another form of colonisation’ (Trahar, 2006, p.16). Watson argues that narrative research is especially respectful of people with a strong oral tradition, and that “the value of narrative research is that it can elicit evidence of the variety of constructions and responses made by human agents that can indeed change conditions, or enable people to resist changes imposed on them” (p.62). However, as Elliott (2005) argues, the method is no less exploitative than other methods, depending on how it is used.
Clearly, then, the method is useful to me in this study for a number of reasons. I am trying to answer, inter alia, the question of what leads certain people to critique the existing,
hegemonic system. I am thus looking at the lived experience of people who have, I believe,
‘unlearned’ the hegemony of a particular historical and social frame (neoliberal ideology) by interpreting, understanding and accounting for the way the world is - in other words, have created alternative or ‘subversive’ stories. So I am looking at processes of change, of learning (and ‘unlearning’), of the link between individuals and society. I am attempting to account
for how and why any unlearning has happened, including trying to unpack their own understanding of it (the meaning they give to what has happened) - in other words, dealing with issues of consciousness. I am also trying to test theory; and the notion of ‘events’ having significance within narratives also sits well with Badiou’s theory of the event, which, as I have argued in Chapter 1, may have some usefulness in understanding the process of
‘unlearning’ hegemony.
However what I am clearly interested in are particular stories (life stories) of particular people. Within the narrative approach, biography is a particular kind of narrative, focusing on the story of a person’s life. Life history is a particular type of biography, focusing on an individual’s life, and how it reflects cultural themes of society, personal themes, institutional themes and social histories (Creswell, 1998). Life histories allow us to look at the connection between people’s lived experiences and social and institutional structures (Dex, 1991, p.1), because “individuals’ experiences reflect the structural facts which impinged upon them and troubled or constrained their experiences and actions” (Dex, 1991, p.2). In addition, “the life story method is based on a combination of exploring and questioning, within the context of a dialogue with the informant” (Thompson, 1981, p.294), and thus allows for both the expected and unexpected. A life history approach can bridge the gap between psychological theories (which look at the individual), and sociological theories, such as Marxism (which look at social control, class conflict, change etc. at a societal level) (Thompson, 1981).This allows both theory building and theory testing at the same time (Thompson, 1981; Dex, 1991). The life history method is thus particularly relevant for my study for three reasons:
1. A life history approach focuses on experience and reflection - both, as we will see, critical elements of transformative/experiential learning;
2. According to Badiou, only the person who has experienced an ‘event’ (i.e. acquired agency) would know this; thus we would need their word for it that they had
experienced this at all. A life history approach allows this;
3. As Watson (2006) suggests, a life history approach is ‘especially respectful’; it captures ‘those voices that might otherwise go unheard/unnoticed’ (Cortazzi & Jin, 2006). This approach thus fits with the political positioning and intent of Alain
However, what is also potentially valuable about a life history approach in my case is it’s potential synergy with my own political position, and my own concerns about how research is often conducted. As Thompson (1981) argues, “the life history method at least makes us confront the violence that can be done to other people’s consciousness by imposing our own terms on it” (p.293). The method can allow the participant to set the overall framework within which information is given, rather than the researcher.
This suggests that a narrative/life history approach is appropriate within a critical frame. Is this in fact so? What about the discussion above about the ways in which methods are
‘situated’ within particular approaches or paradigms?
Etherington (2006) argues that narrative research emerges from the postmodernist paradigm:
The narrative ‘turn’ is away from reification of grand narratives or dominant
discourses and towards the valuing of local stories; away from the idea that there is a single ‘right’ way to approach social research and towards a pluralist tradition and multiple ways of knowing and learning (including multiple ways of understanding and conducting narrative research and reflexivity). (p. 79)
It is certainly true that there has been a “great flowering” in writing about narrative in the last few decades (Davis, 2002, p.3), which, as Webster & Mertova (2007) argue, has largely been a response to the constraints imposed by conventional research methods, and the emergence of postmodernism and its interest in the individual and the influence of experience and culture on the construction of knowledge. The methods’s interest in, and helpfulness with, uncovering and understanding meaning also makes it popular within an interpretive paradigm. However, the use of a narrative approach began long before the emergence of postmodernism/deconstructive paradigms, and its roots lie far more in the emancipatory tradition, for example, in the oral history of humanist Marxist historiography. Daniel
Bertaux’s 1981 Biography and Society: The Life History Approach to the Social Sciences, for example, includes a number of chapters from a broadly neo-Marxist perspective. Bertaux himself, in his introduction to the book, says that he was a Positivist who had been radically altered by the events of May 1968 (Paris). Bertaux traces a history of the life history
approach, and argues that it was critical to transcend the functionalism, structuralism and orthodox Marxism dominant at the time, to allow “a more dialectic and humanist look at our changing world” (p.7). The key theoretical issue, for Bertaux and the authors of the chapters in the book was “what is the relationship between the individual and collective praxis and sociohistorical change?” (p.6). It is clear how a narrative approach would be useful in this regard. Narrative\life history approaches were also strong within a social history approach in both the United Kingdom and South Africa in 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.
Grumet (1987) argues that the Marxist “understands story telling as a negotiation of power”
(p.320). It matters who is telling the story, and how and where, not just because of what it says about the teller, but because our stories shape us. “The politic of narrative is not then, merely a social struggle, but an ontological one as well. We are, at least partially, constituted by the stories we tell to others and to ourselves about experience” (p.322). Grumet’s
observations suggest why the method came to be seen as so useful to those working within a deconstructive frame, with its emphasis on the individual as always under construction (particularly by discourse).
However, the emancipatory tradition emphasises the relation between the individual and social structures of power, and it is for this reason that its exponents see narrative as a useful tool. Franco Ferrarotti (1981) thus argues that narrative/life stories are the only means available to explore the link between the individual/micro (the area of psychology) and society/macro (the area of sociology):
We must look for the epistemological foundations of the biographical method...in a dialectical reason capable of understanding the reciprocal synthetic praxis which governs the interaction between an individual and a social system...Only dialectical reason allows us to interpret the objectivity of a fragment of social history on the basis of the non-evaded subjectivity of an individual history. Only dialectical reason gives us access to the universal and to the general (society), starting from the
individual and the singular (a given man) (sic). (pp.20-21)
In his argument for the narrative method, Ferrarotti is influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre, whom he quotes:
A man (sic) is never an individual; a better term would be a singular universal;
having been totalized, and thus universalized, by his epoch, he retotalizes it by reproducing himself into it as a singularity. Being at once universal through the singular universality of human history, and singular through the universalizing singularity of his projects, he needs to be studied from both perspectives
simultaneously. And this calls for an appropriate method. (Sartre, quoted in Ferrarotti, 1981, p.21).
Sartre felt that this method was the progressive-regressive method - a horizontal and vertical reading of the biography of the individual and the social system. Drawing on Sartre’s
argument that one individual is not all individuals, that “the individual is not the founder of the social, but rather its sophisticated product” (Ferrarotti, 1981, p.26), the true element of analysis is not the individual, but the primary social group to which the individual belongs. If this is so, then:
the renewal of the biographical method may necessitate a new theory of social action.
This theory would not be based on the action of one or more individual agents, but rather on the action of a social totality, the small group, read through non-
mechanistic, ‘anthropomorphic’ models. (Ferrarotti, 1981, p.26)
Elliott (2005), however, suggests that a narrative/life history approach is not necessarily useful within an emancipatory tradition, because “it can be very difficult for women and members of other disadvantaged groups to see and understand general systems of inequality from the perspective provided by their own everyday lives” (p.145). Ewick and Silbey (1995, p.212, quoted in Elliott, 2005, p.146) say “our stories are likely to express ideological effects and hegemonic assumptions....[our stories] often articulate and reproduce existing ideologies and hegemonic relations of power and inequality”. So, “narratives that individuals tell can be understood as profoundly implicated in constituting and reinforcing...hegemony” (Elliott, 2005, p.146). Ewick and Silbey (1995, cited in Elliott, 2005), however, argue that narratives
can be hegemonic; but can also be subversive. Often those who are the at margins of society are more likely to produce counterhegemonic/subversive stories.
Thus narrative research has been shaped by the broader debates and concerns about knowledge, knowledge production, and research over the past few decades. Casey (1995) argues that narrative research is “both pervasive and elusive” (p.211), and is “in all of its various manifestations,...deeply implicated in contemporary conflicts over theory,
methodology, and politics in scholarly investigation” (Ibid, p.211). It is not surprising, then, that narrative research can be claimed by both Marxists and postmodernists. Interpretivists, with their emphasis on subjective meaning-making and multiple truths, are also inclined towards narratives. What is clear is that the assumptions and theories underlying a particular way of viewing narrative research needs to be made clear by whoever is using it - as Chase (1995, quoted in Watson, 2006, p.62) argues, “narrative research must be grounded in a particular theoretical commitment”. This commitment then shapes how the method is used to gather data, how this data is analysed, and how it is written up. Recently, however, the method appears to have been uncritically adopted, as if it is simply a technical method that can be used at will, rather than one which shifts and changes depending on the underlying epistemological and even ontological beliefs of the user.
In the discussion below, I have drawn on literature from both frames, as appropriate; but have not included references to literature that is from a wholly postmodernist perspective/counter critical research, since this is contra the paradigm within which I am working. For example, discussions about data collection are fairly useful across both the emancipatory and
deconstructivist approach; but analysis tends to be very different, because the different
understandings of reality, knowledge and truth, and the different intentions of the approaches.