On Narrative Inquiry

"The literature on narrative inquiry has been, until now, widely scattered and theoretically incomplete. Clandinin and Connelly have created a major tour de force. This book is lucid, fluid, beautifully argued, and rich in examples. Students will find a wealth of arguments to support their research, and teaching faculty will find everything they need to teach narrative inquiry theory and methods."--Yvonna S. Lincoln, professor, Department of Educational Administration, Texas A&M University Understanding experience as lived and told stories--also known as narrative inquiry--has gained popularity and credence in qualitative research. Unlike more traditional methods, narrative inquiry successfully captures personal and human dimensions that cannot be quantified into dry facts and numerical data. In this definitive guide, Jean Clandinin and Michael Connelly draw from more than twenty years of field experience to show how narrative inquiry can be used in educational and social science research. Tracing the origins of narrative inquiry in the social sciences, they offer new and practical ideas for conducting fieldwork, composing field notes, and conveying research results. Throughout the book, stories and examples reveal a wide range of narrative methods. Engaging and easy to read, Narrative Inquiry is a practical resource from experts who have long pioneered the use of narrative in qualitative research.

A concise volume aimed at researchers and academics in sociology, anthropology, psychology and interpersonal communication.

Introducing key ideas of narrative inquiry, this is the first book to explore in depth the theoretical underpinnings of the methodology. The authors open up ways of thinking about people's experiences and their lives, which are situated and shaped by cultural, social, familial, institutional, and linguistic narratives. The authors draw on a range of theorists, creative nonfiction writers, poets, and essayists. The book is arranged into five parts covering a range of topics including: embodiment, memory, knowledge, wonder, imagination, community, responsibility, and place. Each section ends with a methodological discussion of their work involving refugee families with young children from Syria.

This pocket guide presents a reader-friendly introduction to narrative inquiry. It addresses major aspects of the design and implementation of a narrative research project, emphasizing established and emerging approaches to the analysis of narrative data.

Composed by international researchers, the Handbook of Narrative Inquiry: Mapping a Methodology is the first comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of the developing methodology of narrative inquiry. The Handbook outlines the historical development and philosophical underpinnings of narrative inquiry as well as describes different forms of narrative inquiry. This one-of-a-kind volume offers an emerging map of the field and encourages further dialogue, discussion, and experimentation as the field continues to develop.

Organized around a metaphor of an academic journey, D. Jean Clandinin offers published tracings of an unfolding journey over 40 years that, at its outset, appeared to focus only on questions of epistemology. However, the book illuminates how that apparent beginning focus shape-shifted to questions of methodology, ethics, ontology, and subsequently, political concerns. Clandinin shows that, even at the outset, her research wonders were grounded in relational understandings of experience, understandings that were simultaneously ontological, methodological, epistemological and ethical. Jean’s work is collaborative, an engagement alongside others and within the contexts in which they and she lived and worked, including those who were participants in the research. She continues to acknowledge that narrative inquiry changes people’s ways of being in the world, and those changes have ethical significance. While what she and her colleagues now call relational ethics has always been central, recently her sense of ethics has become more explicitly political. She shows the development of ideas over time, beginning as she entered doctoral work and continuing through 2019 and onward. Jean’s work, centered on relational understandings of experience, highlights ethical dimensions, and has come to define narrative understandings for generations of researchers. This book will be an invaluable resource for researchers and graduate students, and professional researchers in both educational and healthcare settings. .

While organisations have become central for thinking and structuring contemporary social action, existing perspectives on what they are and how to deal with them are still rooted in modern ideas about the foundations of society. The chapters in this volume take critical narrative inquiry -- inspired by post-modern or post-human approaches to organisations -- as a broad range of research and development strategies that challenge the dominant perspectives prevalent in the organisational literature. The purpose of the volume is three-fold. Firstly, a critical reading of organisations foregrounding notions of power and ethics is presented. Secondly, a new framework for understanding and analysing organisational action based on critical notions of storytelling and sustainability is unfolded. Thirdly, the framework is deployed through innovative concepts and learning methodologies for leadership, organisational, or community development. The authors engage in philosophical and theoretical reflections on the ways contemporary organisations work. They also present and analyse case studies of power, storytelling and learning in organisations. As a whole the book provides examples of what can be done to make organisations work in more appropriate ways in the future.

Understanding Narrative Inquiry: The Crafting and Analysis of Stories as Research is a comprehensive, thought-provoking introduction to narrative inquiry in the social and human sciences that guides readers through the entire narrative inquiry process—from locating narrative inquiry in the interdisciplinary context, through the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings, to narrative research design, data collection (excavating stories), data analysis and interpretation, and theorizing narrative meaning. Six extracts from exemplary studies, together with questions for discussion, are provided to show how to put theory into practice. Rich in stories from author Jeong-Hee Kim’s own research endeavors and incorporating chapter-opening vignettes that illustrate a graduate student's research dilemma, the book not only accompanies readers through the complex process of narrative inquiry with ample examples, but also helps raise their consciousness about what it means to be a qualitative researcher and a narrative inquirer in particular.