Authoring: Telling a Research Story

In: The SAGE Encyclopedia of Communication Research

Methods

By: Laura L. Ellingson

Edited by: Mike Allen
Book Title: The SAGE Encyclopedia of Communication Research Methods
Chapter Title: "Authoring: Telling a Research Story"
Pub. Date: 2018
Access Date: August 25, 2021
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc
City: Thousand Oaks
Print ISBN: 9781483381435
Online ISBN: 9781483381411
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483381411
Print pages: 66-69
© 2017 SAGE Publications, Inc All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Research Methods. Please note that the pagination of the
online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.
SAGE SAGE Research Methods
2017 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Researchers write accounts of “what happened” when they conduct research. Typically taking the form
of reports suitable for publication in an academic journal or as a chapter in an edited research collection
centered on a particular theory or topic, these accounts are neither transparent nor self-evident truths.
Instead, researchers author research accounts in a complex process that can be productively framed
as storytelling or composing a narrative about research inquiry. Regardless of where researchers situate
themselves on the methodological continuum—ranging from positivist science at one end, through qualitative
and interpretive social science, to artistic, impressionist representations of lived experience at the other
end—all research stories reflect and construct cultural meanings, describe why and how the inquiry was
conducted, and suggest what value the outcomes may have for others. Audiences for research stories
include primarily researchers and theorists, teachers, and practitioners, and also may expand to include
the general public. This brief essay describes a storied approach to understanding the research endeavor.
Then it briefly discusses the possibilities and problematics of authoring research stories from five research
perspectives: postpositivist, interpretive, critical, postmodern, and arts based. In practice, these perspectives
are not discrete but they overlap; here, they are separated only for ease of discussion.

What it means to tell a research story varies according to the author’s views on epistemology, or ways of
knowing the world. That is, research stories assume that readers have in common some assumptions, or
are willing to consider assumptions articulated in a story, about what counts as evidence, what it means
to claim to have produced knowledge, and how that knowledge should be applied to specific contexts (or
not). Understanding research as constituted through academic storytelling opens rich possibilities for both
valuing and critiquing research outcomes because such an approach is rooted in humanity’s fundamental
form of communication: stories. We live our lives as storytellers and story listeners. Rhetorician Walter Fisher
advocated for understanding human beings as homo narrans, or inherent storytellers who make sense of their
own experiences through constructing stories that they share with others, collectively co-creating, sustaining,
and transforming larger cultural stories through which they live.

A story generally begins with an introduction to character, scene, and plot, and it ends with a resolution to
the action and often a moral or lesson. So too does research tell a story—researchers/narrators take readers
on a quest with some guiding principle (theory), using one or more ways of traveling (methods) in order to
obtain some hitherto elusive prize (results) that is valuable to one or more interested parties (applications
and implications). Each story told contributes to readers’ expectations for the particular genre. Knowing that
a novel is classified as a thriller, for example, leads readers familiar with that genre to expect a protagonist in
some type of trouble, who (literally or figuratively) runs away from a villain and toward a solution to the mystery
at the heart of the trouble, ending with the protagonist triumphant, the unknown elements revealed, safety
restored, and often treasure, romance, or important knowledge acquired. In the same way, knowing what
genre a research story falls into informs readers what (types of) theory may be invoked, methods employed,
results generated, and implications derived.

Theories guide research stories as grand narratives, or meta-stories, that shape the interpretation of research

Authoring: Telling a Research Story

Page 2 of 7
SAGE SAGE Research Methods
2017 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

stories by informing readers of the expectations for the particular type of story they are reading (e.g.,
experiment, ethnography, feminist critique) within the larger genres of quantitative social science, qualitative
social science, critical reading of cultural texts, and so on. Steeped within cultural expectations for how
stories are told, researchers learn the specific storytelling conventions of their particular disciplines and sub-
disciplines as apprentices to master storytellers, that is, as graduate students mentored by researchers who
teach courses, direct dissertations, and socialize their protégées in the norms of the professional culture of
their discipline. Writing research stories well is a necessary prerequisite to influencing theory and practice in
any given discipline. The five types of research stories discussed herein include postpositivist, interpretive,
critical, postmodern, and arts-based.

Postpositivist Research Stories

Perhaps the most numerous group of social scientists, postpositivists may have shifted only slightly from the
axioms of positivism, or they may have wandered quite a long way “post” those views of science. Positivism
is rooted in Western Enlightenment beliefs of the scientific method as a way to generate pure truths about an
external, discoverable world that can be measured accurately with the primary goals of prediction and control.
Postpositivists acknowledge that pure truth, uncontaminated by culture, language, and human cognition, is
impossible; yet their goal remains to aim for a research story that is as close to that “unbiased” ideal as
possible. Postpositivists are unlikely to think of the accounts they generate as stories, because authorship
appears to them as a relatively unproblematic process that follows the real work of designing and carrying
out tests of hypotheses and measuring outcomes using complex statistical measures of carefully defined
variables in controlled conditions. Authorship thus centers on rendering the most accurate account possible
of the surveys, experiments, analyses of relationships among variables in databases, or other statistical tests,
or of systematic, structured analyses of qualitative data generated through interviews or ethnography, or
gathered from popular culture texts. Postpositivists then argue for the uniqueness and value of the insights
garnered from their research.

Yet postpositivist research also is a story form, with identifiable characters, plot, voice, and the expectations
of a particular writing genre. Postpositivist stories are told with an omniscient narrator who positions herself
or himself as irrelevant to the research process. The narrator presents in spare and concrete language
why the research was undertaken (justification based on previous research), articulates the objective of the
adventure (the theory to be tested and refined), dutifully describes the design for testing the theory (the
map for the journey), and details the process of undergoing the trials and tribulations of the rigorous, valid,
replicable research journey (the plot) with the carefully selected subjects, from whom data are drawn. The
narrator concludes by offering the significant insights about the theory-world, as well as the limitations of the
story. Postpositivist research stories must conform tightly to narrowly prescribed guidelines for this genre;
in general, innovation is valued in terms of research design and argument development, but deviations
from the strict organizational report format—introduction, literature review, methods, results, discussion, and
conclusion—are not welcomed. Writing must be concise but also persuasively convey the importance of the
questions posed to which they respond.
Authoring: Telling a Research Story
Page 3 of 7
SAGE SAGE Research Methods
2017 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Interpretive Research Stories

As social constructionists, interpretive researchers view the world as constructed through language and
interaction, and they point to the grand narratives of culture that shape (and are shaped by) the stories
told by individuals, groups, families, communities, and institutions. Grand narratives are broad-stroke stories
that embody the values and beliefs of cultures (e.g., democracy, religion, gender roles, education, and
scientific progress). Individual research stories then, while all unique, also reflect conventions, rules of the
genres in which research stories should be produced. Interpretive researchers construct stories that include
themselves as characters; the stories often include explanations of why the researchers were drawn to their
topics and how their unique selves (e.g., gender, race, class, sexuality, disability, particular life experiences)
shaped and were shaped by the journey. The plots of these research stories are less tightly controlled
and structured than those told by postpositivists, and the lessons learned from the journey are explained
in terms of the specificities of the context in which they were experienced. Language is rich and detailed,
offering what anthropologist Clifford Geertz termed thick description of the research participants, who function
as characters in the story (rather than merely sources of data) and often shape the plot in crucial ways.
The moral of the story is what is learned about participants’ lifeworld through the lens of the researchers’
standpoints and expressed values. Often very practical insights are offered as lessons for practitioners,
parents, educators, or other specific groups similar to those studied. Narrative researchers may tell stories
that contain vignettes and extended quotes from participants that help construct nuanced portrayals of
particular social interactions and contexts.

Critical Research Stories

Critical researchers embrace theoretical ways of making sense of a world that focus on power dynamics.
Critical theorists reject neutrality and argue that research embodies assumptions about identities such as,
among others, gender (feminist), race (critical race), socioeconomic class (neo-Marxist), ability (disability or
crip), sexuality (queer), and citizenship (post-colonialism). Critical research stories begin by presenting a
lens through which the story will be told and making explicit how this lens differs from a supposedly neutral
lens. These researchers often seek to construct counternarratives, or stories that reveal much of what has
been left out, discounted, or distorted by more traditional research stories. They point out that most research
stories have been told by people who enjoy disproportionate social privilege and that those stories illuminate
how life is experienced by some types of people, while claiming to tell stories of how life is for everyone.
For example, a feminist may tell a research story about women living in poverty who engage in activism to
improve their communities; such a story speaks to dominant narratives about poor and marginalized groups.
The researcher is not only a character in the story but the particular identity of the researcher is crucial to
establishing her credibility as a storyteller for these particular tales. Plots are constructed in which researchers
seek to richly illustrate the realities of marginalized groups and/or to detail a journey in which the researcher
learns a valuable lesson about power and knowledge construction from participants, who become (to some
degree) coresearchers, schooling the researcher in their culture, practices, and language.

Authoring: Telling a Research Story

Page 4 of 7
SAGE SAGE Research Methods
2017 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Postmodern Research Stories

Postmodern researchers tell research stories that trouble the very notion of authorship. Indeed, they suggest,
often drawing on the work of theorist Michel Foucault, that rather than thinking of researchers as authors who
construct narratives, researchers would be better served to think of their researcher-selves as produced by
cultural discourses. From a postmodern vantage, the quest to tell an authoritative story about research—to
assert a claim to power based upon pristine, scientific truth—is not about reason, rationality, or objectivity,
but about the desire for mastery and control. Claims of expertise are thus claims to power and authority in
a modernist sense of achieving control over others. Postmodern theorists generally tell stories about stories;
they deconstruct the stories of others to analyze the ways in which power, privilege, and resistance manifest
implicitly and explicitly. Postmodern research stories often suggest that an author or a particular story reflects
a standpoint that favors men over women, white people over people of color, those deemed normally able
over those with disabilities; heterosexuals over members of the lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual, and
queer community; the affluent over the poor, for example. Deconstruction is itself a form of storytelling, with
conventions that are carefully enforced by those construed as credible deconstructionist storytellers.

Arts-Based Research Stories

Finally, arts-based or narrative researchers’ storytelling more closely resembles what the general public tends
to think of as stories. Researchers who work from ethnographic, autoethnographic, and performance studies
perspectives express the social realities that they have studied through fiction and nonfiction stories, poetry,
performance art, photography, and other art forms. Data collection may proceed in systematic, organized
fashion (e.g., interviews of group members), within the routines of daily life and journaling (autoethnography),
or through analyzing public stories (e.g., news, films, blogs, television) surrounding an event, topic, or theme
(e.g., combat veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder, midwives assisting in home births, responses to
the Haiti earthquake). Stories, performances, and art in virtually any media can be an expression of content
themes, critical moments in history, or the structures of cultural norms, for example. Arts-based research
stories are told much as they are by any artist in a given medium, often drawing on researchers’ passions and
interests, which they bring to their research processes from the rich textures of their lives, such as dancing,
painting, cinematography, or fiction writing.

Ethical Considerations

In all forms of research stories, researchers have ethical responsibilities to their audiences, which consist
primarily of other researchers who are looking for practices, information, and knowledge to use in their
own research storytelling. Ethical issues generally are discussed in relation to the treatment of participants
by the researchers (i.e., obtaining informed consent and doing no harm to participants). Yet researchers’
representation of participants also necessitates careful ethical choices. Researchers bear a responsibility to
engage an articulate imagination, to show readers what other choices are possible and what other frames

Authoring: Telling a Research Story

Page 5 of 7
SAGE SAGE Research Methods
2017 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

may be employed, for example, to understand cultural norms as different ways of being in the world instead of
problems needing to be solved by experts. Furthermore, research writing poses the dilemma of representing
marginalized groups in progressive and empowering ways. One way to represent participants responsibly
is to tell multiple research stories in a variety of genres about a single data set; the juxtaposition of stories
highlights the constructed and partial nature of all genres, a process referred to as crystallization.

In conclusion, authoring is accomplished through a series of choices made (not always consciously) by
researchers with specific standpoints. Research stories are mutually constitutive with larger cultural
discourses surrounding power, identity, and knowledge. Possible types of research stories include
postpositivist, interpretive, critical, postmodern, and arts-based. Authoring practices are never neutral;
instead, authoring is a responsibility that researchers should take seriously as a potentially empowering
opportunity to influence one’s discipline, institution, academia, and beyond.

Laura L. Ellingson

See also Publication, Politics of; Social Constructionism; Writing Process, The

Further Readings

Ellingson, L. L. (2009). Engaging crystallization in qualitative research: An introduction. Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage.

Fine, M., Weis, L., Weseen, S., & Wong, L. (2000). For whom? Qualitative research, representation, and
social responsibilities. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp.
107–132). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Fisher, W. R. (1987). Human communication as narration: Toward a philosophy of reason, value, and action.
Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.

Frank, A. W. (2004). After methods, the story: From incongruity to truth in qualitative research. Qualitative
Health Research, 14, 430–440. doi:10.1177/1049732303261955

Lewis, P. J. (2011). Storytelling as research/research as storytelling. Qualitative Inquiry, 17, 505–510.

doi:10.1177/1077800411409883

Preissle, J. (2007). Feminist research ethics. In S. N. Hesse-Biber (Ed.), Handbook of research: Theory and
praxis (pp. 515–532). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Slack, J. D., Miller, D. J., & Doak, J. (1993). The technical communicator as author: Meaning, power, authority.
Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 7, 12–36. doi:10.1177/1050651993007001002

Tracy, S. J. (2012). The toxic and mythical combination of a deductive writing logic for inductive qualitative
research. Qualitative Communication Research, 1, 109–141. doi:10.1525/qcr.2012.1.1.109

Authoring: Telling a Research Story

Page 6 of 7
SAGE SAGE Research Methods
2017 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Usher, R. (1997). Telling a story about research and research as story-telling: Postmodern approaches to
social research. In G. McKenzie, J. Powell, & R. Usher (Eds.), Understanding social research: Perspectives
on methodology and practice (pp. 27–41). London, UK: Falmer.

Laura L. Ellingson

http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483381411.n27
10.4135/9781483381411.n27

Authoring: Telling a Research Story

Page 7 of 7