mccomas, June 16, 2002 at 4:48:47 PM CEST

Narrative Inquiry?

This week I've been reading Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research by D. Jean Clandinin and F. Michael Connelly. Their story resonates within me as I recognize my natural tendency toward an interest in narrative inquiry, or stories. At one point in the book, they raise the question about why they chose narrative inquiry as opposed to ethnography....explaining, essentially, that narrative is a part of their history and experience. Viewing people as a collection of stories, past-present-future, and a desire to understand those stories as a way of understanding a phenomena. The difference between ethnography and narrative inquiry is that in ethnography one studies a culture and in narrative inquiry, one studies a phenomena. In the studying of a phenomena, one picks exemplars, or people who participate in that particular phenomena as the focus of the study. They make it clear, however, that one is not studying the people, but the phenomena, or experience. An example is one researcher who wanted to know more about the experience of team teaching...her phenomena was team teaching. To study this phenomena, she focused on two team-teachers, but they were not what the study was about. It was through them that she learned about the phenomena under investigation...the team-teaching.

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