CRAFTING A STORY: REPRESENTATION OF DATA
3. STORIES, NARRATIVES AND STORIED NARRATIVES
towards reconciliation, stories have been used to document the past as well as provide a therapeutic mechanism to come to terms with its past. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has documented the apartheid stories of individuals and organisations.
The stories that have been written have, understandably, been those of the most marginalised groups. There are stories about workers, poor people and women. This review does not include stories about academics. But the stories of people who have succeeded and stories about middle class people also need to be written.
and women who make the science." Nelson Mandela's (1994) autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, set against the backdrop of the racist South African society reflects both Mandela's story as well as the story of the African National Congress. Kenneth Manning's (1983) biography of the scientist E E Just Black Apollo ofScience: The Life of Ernest Everett Just was categorised by Science as a book which "blends social, institutional, black and political history with the history of science." The autobiographies of Ellen Kuzwayo (1996); Phyllis Ntantala's (1992) and Mamphele Ramphele (1995) tell the story of personal and political growth of black women in South Africa.
Looking through the shelves of a bookstore or a library, one can find biographies and autobiographies of South Africans involved in politics and sports. There are no stories of South Africans in academia.
3.1. Storied narratives
Using Bruner's catergorisation of the paradigmatic and narrative cognition, Polkinghorne (1995) has classified two types of narrative inquiry. He calls the type of analysis that employs paradigmatic reasoning, analysis of narratives and the type that uses narrative reasoningnarrative analysis. In analysis of narratives researchers collect stories as data and analyse them with paradigmatic processes which result in producing themes that hold across the stories (this will be discussed in detail in Chapter Eleven). In narrative analysis researchers collect descriptions of events and happenings and configure them by means of a plot into a story. This is discussed in this section.
While we know a great deal about how science and logical reasoning proceed, we know very little in any formal sense, about how to make good stories (Plummer 1990;
Polkinghorne 1995; Bruner 1985; Lawrence-Lightfoot 1997). The generic make up of a story is that it has a temporal dimension. It has a beginning, middle and an ending. It is held together by recognisable patterns or events called plots.
Stories have been used in different disciplines to serve different purposes. In the psychological domain the subject matter of stories is human action (Bruner 1985;
Polkinghorne 1995; Sarbin 1986). Narratives are then constructed to explain why a person acted as he or she did and makes actions understandable. In the sociological domain, narratives are constructed to illuminate the dynamic interaction between individual agency and social structure. Stories are also used to illuminate lives and they are powerful because through stories we can "capture the richness, complexity and
dimensionality of human expenences m social and cultural contexts conveymg the perspectives of the people who are negotiating the experience" (Lawrence-Lightfoot
1997).
3.2. Process of constructing a story
In the process of narrative analysis the researcher organises the data elements into a coherent, developmental account. The outcome is a story. Polkinghorne(l995) describes narrative analysis as the type of discourse composition that draws together diverse events, happenings and actions of human lives into thematically unified goal- directed processes. Narrative configuration is the process by which happenings are drawn together and integrated into a temporally organised whole. The configurative process employs a -thematic thread to layout happenings as part of an unfolding movement that culminates in an outcome. The thematic thread is called a plot and the plot's integrating operation is called emplotment.
The result of narrative analysis is an explanation that is retrospective, having linked past events together to account for how a final outcome might have come about.
Narrative analysis composes the elements into a story. The researcher asks the question,
"How did this happen?" or "Why did this come about?" and searches for pieces of information that contribute to the construction of a story that provides an explanatory answer to the question. As the plot begins to take form, the events and happenings that are crucial to the story's outcome become apparent. The emerging plot informs the researcher about which items from the gathered data should be included in the final storied account. Elements which do not contradict the plot, but which are not pertinent to its development do not become part of the story. This process is called narrative smoothing (Spence 1986).
Polkinghome (1995) proposed the following steps in writing a story. Firstly it is to arrange the data elements chronologically. Identify the elements that contribute to the outcome. The researcher then looks for connections of cause and influence among events and identifies action elements by providing the 'because of and 'in order to' reasons. These connections are not one on one but are combinations and accumulations of events that influence a response or an action. Lastly, the researcher writes the story.
The storied product is a temporal organisation in which the meaning of each part is given through its reciprocal relationship with the plotted whole and other parts.
In a story there is a narrative structure called the plot. Through the plot people understand and describe the relationship among the events and choices of their lives.
According to Polkinghome (1995 :7) plots function to compose events into a story in the following ways: Firstly, a plot delimits the temporal range which marks the beginning and end of the story. Secondly, it provides criteria for the selection of events to be included in the story. Thirdly, plots temporally order events into an unfolding movement culminating in a conclusion. Fourthly, plots clarify explicitly the meaning that events have as contributors to the story.
A person's life story is an expression of his or her self-understanding of a situation. The researcher's job is then to identify the meaning or understanding that is already implied in the story of the teller. The interpretation is dependent on factors such as: the quality of the relationship between storyteller and interviewer/researcher; the specific interaction with the story-teller during the interview; the theoretical perspective from which the researcher chooses to read the story; the researchers own experiential frame of reference and subjective perspective.
In constructing the story the researcher could use the interview data and provide commentary and interpretive comments. Atkinson (1997:72) suggests ways in which this could be done. The researcher could comment on what is already in the life story;
provide background information as an introduction to the life story or provide a perspective that is not already evident in the life story but could serve to highlight and emphasise the important themes in the story. Other ways in which this could be achieved is for the researcher to include the missing historical, social or cultural background information or insights on what the life story describes; to set the stage for what happened, or, to include the researcher's own experience in doing the interview.
3.3. Research stories
Miles and Huberman (1994:147) use E. M. Forster's famous lines "The king died and then the queen died" and "The king died and the queen died of grief' to distinguish between a descriptive and analytical story. In the first statement the events are listed; the second statement includes an explanation of why something happened. The function of an analytical or research story is to answer the question how and why a particular outcome came about. In producing a story, the researcher draws on theoretical expertise to interpret and make sense of responses and action.
Polkinghorne's (1995) guidelines for constructing stories draw from his work in the psychological domain where stories are used to describe human action. In these stories, how something is said, rather than what is said is important. The research stories I am writing illuminate academic lives. The stories will describe human and social action. In writing these stories my focus will be on what is said. I want to illuminate how individuals negotiated the different dynamics in their lives during a particular historical period. Further I want to illuminate how the dynamics and the negotiation of those dynamics changed over time. I will use Polkinghorne's and Atkinson's guidelines as a basis for the construction of the stories. I have written the stories to show the interplay of political, social, economic and individual dynamics.
The use of stories in research is not acceptable in all domains. Positivists reject the notion of a subjective reality. One of the underlying tenets of positivism is of a single reality that is independent of the researcher. Life story construction uses experience as data and is dependent on the interaction between the individual and the researcher (the issues are discussed in chapter three). The post-modernists and post-structuralists have concerns about the representation of lives in texts. E M Bruner (quoted in Hatch and Wisniewski 1995) distinguishes between a life as lived, a life as experienced and a life as told. To that list I would add Derrida's concern about life as written. The post- modem critique of stories is that the process of writing involves giving linearity to a life that is messy and disordered. The writing process, which gives order and stableness, could convey an incorrect impression. Derrida, a deconstructivist, questions the very possibility of representing a life in the form of a text. Denzin (1989:14) provides a summary of Derrida's position. Derrida (1972) believes that we cannot fully understand the inner life of a person because the understanding is always filtered through the glaze of language, signs and the process of signification. And language is always inherently unstable, in flux, and made up of the traces of other signs and symbolic statements. So there can never be a clear, unambiguous statement of anything.
While the post-modernist and post-structural critique is important to consider in writing the stories, there is also a danger that the critique could lead to a paralysis. I acknowledge that the story is not life but it is a way of a meaningful representation within a text. Understanding the critique provides the researcher with a framework to re- examine their work and improve the quality of representations they produce.
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