Features
Discourse on Narrative Research
The Construction Zone: Literary Elements
in Narrative Research
Cathy A. Coulter and Mary Lee Smith
Narrative research has become part of the landscape of education
inquiry, yet its theory and practice are still debated and evolving.This
article addresses the construction of narratives using literary ele-
ments common to nonfiction and fiction writings. The authors dis-
cuss these elements and use four narratives to illustrate them. They
address how literary elements intersect with more familiar practices
of generating and analyzing evidence to reveal themes, and they relate
these intersections with wider issues about what can be known from
research and how it can be learned.
Keywords: narrative research; qualitative research; research
methodology
I
n the contested terrain of education research, narrative
approaches have established themselves through specialized
publications, special interest groups in the American
Educational Research Association, and a committed community
of scholars. Yet almost all of the theory and practice of narrative
research are still debated, including matters of purpose, methods,
ethics, and validity. As the discussions continue, narrative and
other arts-based forms of research continue to evolve (Barone,
2007; Clandinin & Murphy, 2007; Finley, 2005; Rosiek &
Atkinson, 2007).
In this article we consider a single aspect1 of narrative research:
the construction of narratives as representations of research stud-
ies, using literary elements and devices common to nonfiction
and fiction texts. These elements are familiar to specialists who
theorize, teach, or practice writing but are unfamiliar to the vast
majority of education researchers. Our purpose is to describe
these literary elements to an audience of generalists and illustrate
them by pointing out specific features of four chosen narratives.
For this audience,2 we explore the intersection of narrative con-
struction with conventional trajectories of data generation and
analysis, representation of the results of research, and application
of epistemological notions of warranted evidence.
Educational Researcher,Vol. 38, No. 8, pp. 577–590
10.3102/0013189X09353787
© 2009 AERA. http://er.aera.net
To orient the reader, we organize the rest of the article as
f­ ollows. First, we briefly review the literature that establishes a
context for our work. Next, we describe the literary elements used
to construct narrative accounts, introduce the four texts that will
be used as reference points, and provide examples of the literary
elements. Finally, we examine the intersections of narrative con-
struction with conventional practices and epistemological ideas
regarding evidence and truth.
Literature on Narrative Inquiry
and Narrative Construction
From the wide range of narrative forms of inquiry, Polkinghorne
(1995) designated two basic categories: analysis of narrative and
narrative analysis. The former includes approaches close in form
and function to more general kinds of qualitative studies, in
which “narratives are analyzed into themes and categories”
(Clandinin & Murphy, 2007, p. 636). The latter includes “stud-
ies whose data consist of actions, events, and happenings, but
whose analysis produces stories” (Polkinghorne, 1995, p. 6).
Narrative analysis studies rely on stories as a way of knowing.
Stories emerge as data are collected and then are framed and
rendered through an analytical process that is artistic as well as
rigorous (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Connelly & Clandinin,
1990; Ecker, 1966; Eisner, 1981, 1998; Freeman, 2007). Barone
(2007) calls such studies narrative constructions because “this
recasting of data into a storied form is more accurately described
as an act of textual arrangement” (p. 456). This article focuses on
Polkinghorne’s designation of narrative analysis (Barone’s “narra-
tive construction”). When writing more generally about narrative
as a research process, we use the more general terms narrative
research and narrative inquiry interchangeably.
Foremost in the extant literature on narrative construction is
the idea that narrative research differs from traditional research
studies in matters of purpose. According to Barone, conventional
research strives to discover and verify knowledge about the real
state of the world. In contrast, narrative research strives to portray
experience, to question common understandings, to offer “a
degree of interpretive space” (Barone, 2001c, p. 150). Narratives
have the effect of evoking dissonance in the reader, enabling the
november 2009 577
reader to look at educational phenomena with renewed interest
and a more questioning stance. Narrative research, not unlike
good literature, “causes us to question our values, prompts new
imaginings of the ideal and the possible. It can even stir action
against the conventional, the seemingly unquestionable, the tried
and true” (Barone, 2001a, p. 736). Narratives also introduce the
centrality of emotions in lived experience (Denzin, 1992), which
are aesthetically posed to the reader through familiar story forms.
Conventional researchers who accept the dichotomy of reason
and emotion often bridle at narratives’ explicit use of emotional
descriptions and appeals. Narrative research brings the two parts
of human experience together (cf. Novitz, 1997).3
This line of literature also states that conventional research
appeals solely to the reader’s sense of logic or evidence (and to the
authority of the researcher) and thereby limits the readers’ range
of interpretations (Barone, 2001c). In contrast, narrative research
uses literary devices to allow readers to make sense of the study in
their own ways. Multiple interpretations by multiple readers are
expected and promoted.
One of the debated aspects of narrative research is the ques-
tion of truth (Barone, 2001b; Doyle, 1997; Fenstermacher,
1997; Mayer, 2000; Phillips, 1994, 1997). How do we know
that the researchers’ stories reflect what really happened? In the
main branch of the literature so far reviewed, the questions
about objectivity and truth of narrative research lie outside its
province and purpose.” Indeed, the point of narrative research
is to reveal the subjective experience of participants as they inter-
pret the events and conditions of their everyday lives (Miller,
2005). Barone (2007) wrote that questions of objectivity and
truth emerge from the dominance of the positivist paradigm as
a “regulatory ideal,” which is an inappropriate paradigm for
narrative research. According to Denzin (2000), “Narratives do
not establish the truth of . . . events [or] reflect the truth of
experience. Narratives create the very events they reflect upon.
In this sense, narratives are reflections on—not of—the world as
it is known” (quoted in Riessman, 2008, p. 188).
Richardson (1990) continues in this vein: “Unlike the logico-
scientific mode, which looks for universal truth conditions, the
narrative mode is contextually embedded and looks for particular
connections between events. The connections between the events
is the meaning” (emphasis in original, p. 13). The question of
“did it really happen the way you describe it” is problematic.
Eyewitnesses to the same event have differing accounts depend-
ing on their perspectives. Throw in the filters of time and space,
and “truth” becomes elusive indeed. The task of the narrative
researcher is not to describe the world as it is, because in the
constructivist or postmodern paradigm, that one world does not
exist. Rather, narrative researchers strive to redescribe events ret-
rospectively (Freeman, 2007) through the lens of collaborative
interpretations with participants. They recognize the difference
between the literal truth and the story truth (O’Brien, 1990).
In this section we have discussed existing literature on narrative
research as it bears on narrative construction and the literary ele-
ments that we next describe. We have presented the literature as
grounding for our work. The presentation is incomplete for rea-
sons of space. However, we also argued that the dominant tradition
in narrative research is itself partial and neglects what some have
called modernist or realist tales—an argument we return to later.
578 educational Researcher
Literary Elements and Four Illustrative Cases
Here, we address literary elements themselves and consider
them as research practices, while maintaining a critical eye on the
relationships among researchers, authors, research participants,
characters, events, scenes, and readers. To illustrate these ele-
ments we draw on four narratives.
Snow White, Revolutions, the American Dream,
and Other Fairy Tales
The first illustrative narrative is one of our own (Coulter, 2003).
The reason we use it here is that, while the narrative was con-
structed, every choice was considered and reconsidered. For
example, Coulter experimented with different tones, voices, and
the like to see how each squared with the evidence and repre-
sented the experience of the participants with fidelity and respect.
As we reflected on this decision making and the effects of each
choice, we formulated general hypotheses about narrative con-
struction. Thus we had more material to draw on to describe the
use and narrative effects of literary elements. In Coulter’s study
of the experiences of high school students in a program for
English language learners, she functions first as the teacher of
those students, then as the researcher of those experiences, and
finally as the author of the students’ stories. Eight people, includ-
ing Darek, Vicki, and David, function first as students, then as
research participants, and finally as the characters in the nonfic-
tion novel that Coulter wrote. (All names in the study are pseud-
onyms.) Darek divides his time between a Northwestern city and
his Cu’pik village. His mother is Cu’pik, and his father, now
deceased, was African American. As Darek navigates life at
“Northwest High School,” he is faced with questions of access
and identity. Vicki is a second-generation immigrant whose
father is from Mexico and whose mother is from El Salvador. Her
story reflects the choices she had to make. David lives with his
single mother, who is first-generation Filipino. His story portrays
insight into low expectations and tracking in schools.
This Boy’s Life
For our other three story selections we had less detail. We could
not reproduce the acts of constructing the narratives except by
drawing on the texts themselves. This Boy’s Life (Wolff, 1989) is a
memoir that encompasses the author’s preadolescent and adoles-
cent years and leaves off as he drops out of college to join the
army. He begins the narrative as he and his mother drive west to
Utah, escaping the life of wealth and Protestantism of his father
and older brother in Connecticut, looking for transformation
and independence. He changes his name from Tobias (Toby) to
Jack and hopes to become a different boy. His mother hopes to
strike it rich by mining uranium in Utah. “But we were late—
months too late,” he writes. “Moab and the other mining towns
had been overrun. All the motels were full. . . . There were no
jobs, and people were getting ornery” (p. 6).
His mother finally settles for a job and a poor place to live. He
goes to Catholic school. An abusive man from her past tracks
them down. They escape by driving farther west. Later, she is
courted and then marries a man named Dwight, and the narra-
tive intensifies to reveal the depth of each character and the con-
flicts among them.
 Why did we choose this text? It does not match the conven-
tional education research format of preserving observation notes
and interview transcripts contemporary with the acts recorded.
It  is a retrospective account, similar to historical research. It
potentially suffers from a self-interested reconstruction, but in
that respect it is the same as all memoirs. Its subject matter is not
focused on formal schooling, but nevertheless the author’s school
life constitutes much of the experience that he deems worth
remembering and writing about. We chose this text because it is
iconic in courses and programs in writing for its vivid detail and
consistent, strong voice, and because of Wolff ’s ability to con-
struct scenes—all of which is instructive for narrative researchers.
Down by the River
The third narrative, Down by the River (Bowden, 2004), we
include because of its complex structure and interrelationships of
author and characters over time. The author investigates a mur-
der he reads about in the newspaper. The victim is a man named
Bruno who lives in El Paso. A young man from across the river in
Juarez is arrested for the murder. The circumstances of the arrest,
conviction, and overturning of the conviction leave open the
question of whether larger forces were involved. Bowden finds
that the incident is connected to international drug cartels and
the governments of both the United States and Mexico.
Everywhere he turns in his own study, he finds that the connec-
tive tissue that ties the various elements together makes the story
almost impossible to prove by the standards of research or jour-
nalism. The literary forms he uses mimic the complexity and
ambiguity of the content and provoke complex and ambiguous
responses in the reader.
Why did we choose this text? Among the four, only this one
typifies the postmodern turn in literary criticism (Barone, 2000).
A noted investigative journalist, nonfiction writer, and teacher of
literary nonfiction at the University of Arizona, Bowden writes
with variations in tone, voice, distance, and style and thus requires
readers to make their own sense of his stories. By avoiding pat
answers, he forces readers to rethink their basic views of the world
and of the phenomena he describes. If there are conclusions or
themes, they are of the reader’s making, not the author’s. We chose
this particular text because of these qualities and because we could
not find anything approaching its creative and skillful use of liter-
ary elements in the education research literature.
Sneaky Kid and Its Aftermath
The fourth narrative we use to show literary elements is Sneaky
Kid and Its Aftermath (Wolcott, 2002). The initial section of this
book is a redescription of Wolcott’s ethnographic study of schools
and how they fail some students. He uses as his case a young man,
named Brad, who has taken up residence on Wolcott’s property.
Brad provides extensive material, and the resulting ethnography
is published in a scholarly journal. The narrative then is trans-
formed into a story of the personal relationship between the
researcher and Brad. After the relationship ends, news comes that
Brad has had a psychotic break. He blames Wolcott and comes
back to attack him and burn down his house. The next segment
of the narrative is the story of Brad’s trial and the censure directed
at Wolcott from his scholarly community and from the society in
general. We chose this particular nonfiction narrative because of
the rich material the author has made available in his other works
and his prominence in teaching about the writing of research.
In the preceding subsections, we have attempted to justify our
use of these four texts. They do not represent any universe of
texts, but they do represent authentic examples of the ideas we try
to describe in this article.4
We now turn to our discussion of literary elements as research
tools in narrative research. We first introduce each literary ele-
ment and describe how it is used in writing in the general sense.
We then discuss how the element can be used in research, draw-
ing from our four narratives for examples.
Examples of Literary Elements
Narratives rely on cultural expectations of readers about what
constitutes a story. Stories follow an arc from a beginning to an
end, have characters and sites of action, and comprise events in
scenes arrayed across time in which the characters act or are acted
upon by other characters and events. Without any of these under-
lying elements, there is no story. The rendition of these elements
is the author’s construction, the author’s choice according to his
or her purpose and craft.
In the next subsection we discuss the element known in fiction
writing as point of view. It may be considered as including the next
five elements—person, omniscience, narrator reliability, narrative
voice, and authorial distance (Burroway, 2003)—which we discuss
in their own subsections in turn.
Point of View
Point of view is the lens through which a narrative is told. The
reader sees and hears through the sensibilities and emotions of a
focalized character. In narrative research, point of view consists of
how the story presents the relationships between researcher and
participants, and the relationships of the participants to each
other. The researchers are the writers, and the characters are
participants, people who have played a role in the lives of the
participants, or researchers.
In both narrative theory and narrative research methodology,
the relationships among writers, characters, and readers have
become contentious issues. The writer controls the telling. When
the writer decides which character has agency to “speak” the story
or carry the action forward, she assumes a position of privilege.
In narrative research, the writer who is also the researcher—as she
transforms research participants into characters and narrators in
her story—faces the same issues and more, often juxtaposing her
position of societal privilege against the marginalized position of
her participants. Barone and others argue that the researcher
must attempt to counteract the inherent privilege of this relation-
ship from the very beginning, making literary decisions that
debunk it (Barone, 2000; Emihovich, 1995; Goodson, 1995;
Nespor & Barber, 1995). Relevant to point of view, there are
literary decisions that researchers can make to mitigate the
researcher–participant relationship. These are discussed next, in
connection with the other literary elements.
Person
Addressing the complex issue of point of view involves deciding
on person. Who tells the story? In some cases the author is the
narrator, but the author can also construct another, a character,
november 2009 579
as narrator. The narrator must stand somewhere in relation to the
actions taken by the characters in the story. What knowledge does
the narrator have available at the time of the narrating? The
author can choose from first, second, or third person and can
choose whether a character, a narrator as character, or the author
herself tells the story. A story told in third person uses the third-
person pronouns—he, she, it, or they—and tells the story from a
narrator’s perspective, whether or not that narrator also plays a
part in the action. A story told in first person uses the first-person
pronoun “I.” If that story is told by a character, it is filtered
through her unique perceptions. We later present excerpts of nar-
rative constructions in the third and first persons.
The following excerpt represents a passage Coulter con-
structed to illustrate third-person storytelling:
I.
Darek stood up and started gathering dishes from the dinner
table. He clanked the pots a little too loudly, and then tried to
calm himself. It wasn’t Danny’s fault that he had failed two classes.
Danny looked over at Darek. He knew that he had made Darek
angry. He hadn’t meant to. He just wanted his mother to know
how well he did in school. The mother looked at her two sons.
Good-natured Danny, who tried so hard in school, and strong
Darek, who looked after Danny. Darek must not have done so
well, she thought. It had been such a hard year for him. She
hoped he wouldn’t be too hard on himself. (Adapted from
Coulter, 2009, p. 15)
The above excerpt is narrated in the third person, by a narrator
positioned outside the story. Contrast the effect with that of the
following first-person point of view, in which one character
(Darek) tells his story from his own particular standpoint:
II.
It was one of those drawn-out dusks when I told Thai Boy about
football. Maybe ten, maybe eleven o’clock. I had bounced the ball
and scored a perfect 3-pointer, a swish that didn’t even touch the
rim, though technically it didn’t swish because there was no net
on the Arctic Sun Trailer Park hoop.
“I’m staying another year,” I told him as he was running for
the rebound.
“And he . . . scores!” he said, firing a jump shot which banged
off the bare rim. The ball bounced right back into his hands.
“What?”
“For football. Coach Kellogg asked me to stay for a second
senior year.”
He dribbled the ball criss-cross in front of him, then stopped
and looked at me, ball hitched up on his hip. “You’re staying
another year?” (Coulter, 2009, p. 1)
The decision regarding which person to use in a narrative con-
struction—first, second, or third—is one of the first very impor-
tant choices the researcher makes. There are specific advantages
and disadvantages to the use of first versus third person. In gen-
eral, a first-person construction lends closeness to the telling: The
reader sees the story through the perspective of the character as
narrator—or as participant, in the case of a research narrative—
which can generate feelings of affinity. However, the researcher is
also limited by this decision, as she cannot include information
580 educational Researcher
that the character would not be privy to. Darek can imagine how
Thai Boy feels about his decision to stay for a second senior year,
but he cannot know for sure. Neither can the reader. In the third
person, the narrator can get right into the head of every character
so the reader can see what Thai Boy is thinking, even if Darek
cannot.
Given the concern about the inherent privileging in the
researcher–participant relationship (Barone, 2000; Emihovich,
1995; Goodson, 1995; Nespor & Barber, 1995), both first- and
third-person renderings can be problematic. How can a researcher
get into the head of a participant and tell her story from her per-
spective, using her voice, her words, her thoughts, as in first per-
son? But then how can a researcher presume to get into everyone’s
head, as in the third-person point of view? Richardson (1990)
described the dilemma in “occupying a godlike position” in nar-
rative research texts:
Do researchers have the right to speak for others, distancing
themselves from the text, acting as if their own subjectivity were
not being inscribed in the text? And, conversely, how can the
credibility of the writer’s claims to knowledge be decided? (p. 38)
Either way, the tendency is for the researcher to present her view
as exclusive. The distortion and ethnocentrism that often go
along with such an exclusive rendering can be mitigated by vary-
ing other aspects of point of view: omniscience, narrator reliabil-
ity, tone, authorial distance, and the use of multiple narrators
with varying points of view.
Omniscience
The term omniscience is used to refer to the amount of knowledge
the narrator (and particularly the author as narrator) assumes in
the narrative. The omniscient narrator is an objective “all-
knower,” possessing all of the facts about characters and events
and having access to the heart and mind of every character, such
as in Excerpt I, above, in which the narrator knew what Darek,
Danny, and their mother were thinking. Omniscience functions
to provide general descriptions and interpretations and thus has
a place, for example, at the beginning of the story, where the
author establishes the initial state of affairs, and between scenes,
where the author indicates how much time has elapsed and how
things have changed. Writing the scenes themselves calls for use
of rich and thick description of the concrete particulars necessary
to establish the characters’ actions and intentions. Distanced tell-
ing backs up and fills in between the focused showing (thick
description). Writing a passage such as “Seven years went by
between the time of Chansy’s death and Darek’s reflection on it”
may convey the researcher’s omniscience. But it also functions to
structure the plot line. Researchers cannot represent every single
occasion that happened in the participants’ lives but must choose
which events to concentrate on and which to highlight; other-
wise, the “map” of representation would be as extensive as the
“territory” of the life it represents (cf. Becker, 2007). Choices are
made based on the significance of the included event in the anal-
ysis of the evidence as a whole. This is how Geertz (1973) distin-
guished thick description from simply detailed or rich description.
The omniscient narrator has access to and can describe the
inner thoughts and actions of every character. Thus the omni-
scient third person serves the purpose of economy even as it gives
the impression that the narrator knows equally and completely
the thoughts of each character. This impression is problematic.
Researchers hope to construct adequate understanding of the
lives of their research participants, but most acknowledge that
their understanding, even after years of patient and thorough
work, falls short.5
Another aspect of point of view is limited omniscience, in
which the narrator has access to the thoughts and sensibilities of
one character but not other characters. This perspective lends the
reader a sense of closeness to the story because it is most similar
to what we experience in life. In the following example, Coulter
(2005) used the limited omniscient point of view from the per-
spective of 12-year-old Sahar:
III.
At lunch Taylor Maloney and her groupies had thrown grapes at
her again. She had been walking to her usual spot at lunch recess:
the picnic table in the far corner, right under the mesquite tree.
Suddenly she felt something wet hit her cheek. She looked down
and saw a squished grape on the ground. She didn’t need to look
up to see where it had come from. Taylor and her friends always
sat in the center of the square, on a short cement wall that had
been built around the biggest tree on campus. There they engaged
in various forms of social torture. The latest was “graping” the
least popular passers-by.
“What happened Sa-hair?” Taylor called out. Sahar kept on
walking. Taylor persisted. “Oh my God! There’s a grape in my
sa-hair!!” she said and everyone laughed. Sahar kept her eyes on
the pavement beneath her feet. Taylor had a short attention span.
Out of sight, out of mind. She finally made it to her place under
the mesquite tree. Wiping the rest of the grape off her cheek,
Sahar watched Taylor from afar. She was on to her next victim,
poor little José Cardenes. He was new this year and didn’t speak
much English. He ignored Taylor just like she had. Sahar won-
dered if it ever occurred to anyone that it was mostly minority
students that were ostracized. Not that anyone would care. (p. 7)
The limited omniscient perspective allows the researcher to nar-
rate the activities of all characters in third person, as in the omni-
scient perspective. However, it also has similarities to first person.
The story is rinsed in the sensibilities of a single character, whose
thoughts are accessible to the reader. In Excerpt III above, the
omniscient lens narrows in the line “Out of sight, out of mind”
and again in the line “Not that anyone would care.” These reflect
Sahar’s thoughts, not those of the narrator. Limited omniscience
centers on a single character, and the story is filtered through her
sensibilities. Thus the pitfalls of limited omniscience are similar
to those of first person: How can the researcher narrate through
the sensibilities of a participant whose experiences are vastly
different from his own?
To answer that question, we turn now to the next aspect of
point of view: narrator reliability.
Narrator Reliability
If the researcher chooses to write the account in the first person,
through the eyes of a character, or from a limited omniscient
third-person perspective, he can draw upon the element of nar-
rator reliability. Narrator reliability refers to the degree to which
the reader can trust the narrator. The author can build in signals
to the reader that the narrator’s perspective may or may not be
entirely trusted. The reader is presented with the problem of
assessing how much information the narrator has at a given point
in the story and what the interests and intentions of the narrator
may be. The reader is thus led to see the narrator’s account as
partial or uncertain rather than definitive. In this way, narratives
lead readers to questions rather than to single answers. Varying
the degree of narrator reliability has the potential to introduce
counternarratives and debunk the inherent tendency toward
dominating functions in literary elements when they are applied
to narrative research.
In the following excerpt from Coulter’s study, David describes
how he feels other students at his high school “made themselves
victims of racism.” Notice the detachment created by placing sev-
eral years between the narrated event and the occasion of narration:
IV.
Some people will tell you exaggerated stories. Stories to show how
racist Northwest was. To me, you make your own fate. The kids
that got into trouble got themselves into trouble. Like Eddie. I
mean, they thought Eddie was in a gang, but Eddie really was.
And he made the choice to kill a guy. He made the choice to go
to jail and sit there the rest of his life. Sure, I know there is racism
out there. But people make themselves victims of racism. When
people stereotyped me, I manipulated it to my own benefit. If
other people are stereotyped and then they become what people
think they are, really become it, that’s the choice they make. It’s
not the racism that causes it. It’s a choice they make themselves.
The kids that got into trouble caused it themselves, and they just
want to blame racism for it. (Coulter, 2003, p. 176)
This excerpt shows David’s perspective after several years and con-
siderable reflection. But the data Coulter collected when David
was in high school suggested that in addition to the stereotyping
(which David did not think of as racist), he had, in fact, been an
object of racism. The conflicting evidence shows him to be an
unreliable narrator throughout his story. When the stories of other
students in the study also reflect evidence of racism, the reader has
more information for interpreting David’s view. Rather than try
to show that David is in a state of denial or is lying, however,
Coulter uses the unreliable narrator to provoke the reader into
seeing the complexity of experiences at this school and struggling
to understand how students attempt to make sense of their own
experiences. Use of the unreliable narrator poses an ethical
dilemma when it is used for anyone other than the researcher
herself. How can a researcher say that a participant’s views are
unreliable or misguided and the researcher’s interpretation cor-
rect? Josselson (2007) reminds us that the “self is multiple and
evolving. The aspects of persons we write about are contingent
and selective” (p. 549). Use of the unreliable narrator allows the
researcher to portray layers of self in a single narrative.
After writing a draft of her findings, Coulter presented rele-
vant sections to each person she had rendered as a character and
requested suggestions for revisions (all of which were honored).
David was aware of the content and interpretation and represen-
tation that Coulter had made and was comfortable with the por-
trayal. He stood firm in his point of view and expressed that
Coulter’s portrayal, given his revisions, was accurate. Researchers
november 2009 581
of various qualitative studies would no doubt point out the
complexities and inconsistencies in the varying accounts of
David’s story. In this instance the researcher made no attempt to
stamp a single definitive meaning on David’s experience, instead
employing the literary technique of unreliable narrator to show
the inherent complexities in the situation. The ethics of manipu-
lating reliability in participants’ stories requires a deeper discus-
sion than is possible here.6
Other aspects of narrator reliability warrant discussion, such
as how a researcher as narrator can establish trustworthiness.
Coulter varies person, omniscience, and reliability, but the narra-
tives of Wolff and Wolcott maintain the first-person point of
view throughout. Both Wolff and Wolcott function as narrators.
When other characters speak, the reader knows that their words
are channeled through the narrator from a distance of some years.
The reader allows for ordinary lapses in human memory and
understands that the characters’ words at the time of the event
may not have been rendered exactly or completely. Nevertheless,
the reconstructions are plausible, so the reader regards the author
as narrator as trustworthy.
However, Wolff and Wolcott establish trustworthiness in
quite different ways. Wolcott draws on three sources. The first is
his status and authority as a professional anthropologist. The sec-
ond is his device of interrupting the narrative to introduce discur-
sive arguments from the literature; such introjections are meant
to help readers make the meanings that the narrator wants them
to make. The third is the research methods he used for the first
part of the narrative to study Brad, the “sneaky kid.” He con-
ducted and tape-recorded interviews and took notes from his
extensive number of observations of Brad’s activities over a 2-year
period. The authoritativeness of his data generation, analysis, and
reporting was reinforced by the publication of his paper in a ref-
ereed work. By the standards of professional anthropology, and
even those of journalists and historians, such methods lend trust-
worthiness to a narrative. In contrast, Wolcott’s description of
events subsequent to the publication of his study was not based
on research in the traditional anthropological manner. In those
sections of the book, he was a full participant in the events and
recounted them as life story. His narrator is therefore less trust-
worthy in those sections; this effect is purposeful on his part.
Because these narrated events sound less scientific and less dis-
tanced, the narrative becomes more personal and thus evokes the
readers’ emotions to a greater extent.
Wolff ’s trustworthiness emerges from a different source: his
harsh and unrelenting portrayal of the foibles of his younger self.
One expects self-presentation bias to be positive. But not so with
Wolff. He describes Jack’s exploits: stealing money, stealing cars,
starting fights, cheating, destroying property, torturing animals,
and lying incessantly—the lies meant not only to avoid punish-
ment but to preserve a good image of himself in others’ eyes and
his own. Wolff writes this story without angst or justification, in
cool, detached, detailed prose. In this example, Jack and his
friends have been acting up in the high school lavatory, and Jack
scratches “Fuck You” on the wall:
V.
During the first period after lunch the vice-principal visited every
classroom and demanded the names of those responsible for the
582 educational Researcher
obscenity that had been written in the boys’ lavatory. . . . Well, he
was going to get them if he had to keep every single one of us here
all night long. . . . The vice-principal was new and hard-nosed;
he meant what he said. I knew he wouldn’t let this drop, and
he would keep at it until he caught me. I got scared. Even more
than his anger, his righteousness scared me to the point where my
stomach cramped up. As the afternoon went on the cramp got
worse and I had to go to the nurse’s office. That was where the
vice-principal finally came for me. . . . He kicked the cot where I
lay doubled up and sweating. “Get up,” he said. . . . I sat up part-
way, still miming incomprehension. (Wolff, 1989, p. 77)
The nurse intervenes, claiming Jack is genuinely sick. Wolff con-
tinues: “I couldn’t bear for her to think that I was the kind of
person who took advantage of other people’s kindness or wrote
filth on bathroom walls. And at that moment I wasn’t” (p. 78).
Jack describes more of his high school experience:
I brought home good grades at first. . . . They were a fraud. I
copied other kids’ homework on the bus. . . . The report cards
were made out, incredibly enough, in pencil, and I owned some
pencils myself. (Wolff, 1989, p. 184)
Later, Jack attempts to escape his impoverished home and abu-
sive stepfather, Dwight, by applying to the East Coast prep
schools that his father and brother attended. After an incident
in which Dwight strikes him, Jack calls his brother, who ques-
tions him about his prospects. Jack tells him about his good
grades and invents other accomplishments: He was an Eagle
Scout, he was a stalwart on the swim team, he played in the
band, and so on. Based on this false account, his brother encour-
ages him to apply to prep schools. In filling out the applications
he has this thought: “I had to be that boy I’d described to my
brother” (Wolff, 1989, p. 209).
To accomplish that, Jack steals school stationary, transcript
forms, and envelopes and forges letters of support from counsel-
ors and community members. In this spirit,
Now the words came as easily as if someone were breathing them
into my ear. I felt full of things that had to be said, full of stifled
truth. It was the truth known only to me, but I believed in it more
than I believed the facts arrayed against it. . . . These were ideas
about myself that I had held for dear life. (Wolff, 1989, p. 213)
So much negative self-disclosure makes the account believable
and reminds us of Josselson’s (2007) point that the self is multiple
and evolving. Tobias calls himself Jack for the time covered in the
narrative. He is struck with emotion when his brother calls him
Tobie. When he writes the narrative, he is again Tobias.
Bowden’s Down by the River contrasts with the other three
narratives in point of view. The author switches back and forth
between first and third person, sometimes putting words and
thoughts in the mouths and minds of characters; he changes nar-
rator distance from near to far, formal to informal. Here is an
example of projecting into the thoughts of Patricia, Bruno’s fian-
cée, on the evening of his murder:
VI.
Where is he? . . . [A]s the engine idles, Patricia can feel her irrita-
tion rising. . . . She makes an effort for him. And she is tired of
being late because of him. . . . Bruno can’t seem to ever be on
time. (Bowden, 2004, p. 13)
Two pages later, Bowden shifts to the third person as he draws
back for a more generalized view of what is just outside Patricia’s
immediate vision: “The city swallows dirt. . . . a few blocks away
the Rio Grande (the Rio Bravo to the Mexicans on the opposite
bank, a polluted snake that rises and falls. . . . ).”
Still later in the narrative, Bowden uses the second person to
describe the life of the boy who was tried for Bruno’s murder:
VII.
You are a natural entrepreneur so you leave school to get a part of
the action. You realize there is a greater market for your products
abroad than at home so you leave your nation and your culture
and become a pioneer of free trade and open markets. . . . You
leap out from the curbside at intersections and busily begin wash-
ing the windshields of motorists. You allow the customers to set
their own fees. . . . Your entertainment venture requires more
preparation. You apply makeup to your face until you have the
classic visage of a clown. Then when the light turns red you leap
out and begin to juggle. (Bowden, 2004, pp. 212–213)
Although Bowden quotes and provides footnotes to articles from
newspapers and government reports, he also suggests that such
sources are not to be believed. He uses El Financiero Internacional
and the Dallas Morning News as sources of statistics and news
reports on the Mexican economy but ends the paragraph with an
ironic note:
VIII.
The minimum wage is shrinking minute by minute as 1995 rolls
along [ending the year at] $2.59. President Bill Clinton declares
as the year slides by, “The Mexican economy has turned the cor-
ner and the markets have taken notice.” President Ernesto Zedillo
on a visit to Washington takes the opportunity to deny that he
got $40 million from the Cali cartel for his 1994 campaign.
DEA, the source of the allegation, now denies the allegation.
(Bowden, 2004, p. 215)
The wealth of detail establishes credibility, as does his brief report
of his methods. Bowden did his research firsthand, interviewed
extensively, and put himself in jeopardy to get multiple stories
and a wealth of concrete details over a 7-year period. He has
established narrator reliability and trustworthiness, yet his stance
in the narrative is anything but omniscient.
A prevailing theme throughout Bowden’s book is that all
sources of information contain distortions because of underlying
individual and institutional interests. At best, the sources should
be considered part of the truth: “Facts crumble at a touch”
(Bowden, 2004, p. 160). Here, Bowden addresses this theme and
demonstrates his stance toward the material:
IX.
I am in a black hole. . . . Here is the problem: once you enter this
black hole and truly live in it and taste it, then you understand. .
. . And this understanding doesn’t matter at all. It becomes a curse
and the curse never lifts. (Bowden, 2004, p. 8)
In summary, point of view can be used in research to varying effect.
It is paramount that researchers be purposeful in the literary deci-
sions they make and that they fully understand the implications (in
terms of effect on literary quality and interpretation of data) of
such decisions. We have explored elements of point of view includ-
ing person, omniscience, and narrator reliability. We turn now to
a discussion of other literary elements that serve as tools in narra-
tive research: heteroglossia, authorial distance, and tone.
Narrative Voice
As research studies are transposed into narrative texts, the
researcher can choose to vary the point of view from section to
section, portraying multiple voices. Bakhtin (1981) calls this
approach heteroglossic. The term suggests that different characters
view the action differently or see different parts of the action
portrayed. Such an approach suggests greater complexity of inter-
pretation: A polyvocal account—one in which several characters
narrate their stories—varies the voice from section to section or
chapter to chapter. Narratives and counternarratives are con-
structed from the data and analyses such that the reader is free to
interpret the construction as rendered. In fiction, the writer has
no obligation to characters to present them and their role in the
story with a sense of fairness or truth. The researcher, however,
has multiple interests and obligations.
One of the ways that narrative researchers have tried to remove
themselves from the omniscient point of view is through the use
of multiple narrators and perspectives. Coulter (2003) decided
that the eight participants in her study should narrate their own
stories in first person from their own perspectives. She intended
that the sum of the separate stories would represent the school as
a whole, creating a polyvocal, layered account. Choosing the
first-person point of view also gave Darek the agency to tell this
story from his point of view. After writing Darek’s story, Coulter
confirmed with him that her representation of his story was con-
sistent with his view at the time. All of the people behind the
characters had a chance to review and alter their stories.
Narrative researchers approximate a heteroglossic account in
a number of ways. One way is the form known as pastiche (Ely,
2007), which allows participants to express their points of view
in different forms, for example, in poems, songs, or the like, or
in separate chapters or sections allotted to them. A second way is
dialogue, a necessary part of all narrative texts. Through dia-
logue, the author presents different points of view as expressed
by different participants. Dialogue also presents opportunities to
show how various actors have made meaning from confronta-
tions with others (Becker, 2007). A third way is through the
actions of participants; for example, Darek’s friend Chansy
laughs at the security guard and Darek notes Chansy’s laughter.
Darek and the reader can interpret Chansy as mocking, as an
agent in defying authority. This approach makes possible addi-
tional layers of interpretation on the part of both participants
and readers.
Where does the writer place herself in the complex network of
readers and participants in a narrative? A person transforms her-
self to researcher, then to writer. By using narrative rather than a
conventional research report, the researcher can become a charac-
ter in the story. This provides many options for problematizing
the researcher’s telling. For example, the researcher can take on
two perspectives, that of the writer and that of a character within
the construction. When these two perspectives oppose each other,
there is room for readers to come to their own interpretations.
november 2009 583
Authorial Distance
Authorial distance refers to the degree of immediacy between the
events portrayed and the time and place of the writing. Authors
choose less narrative distance when they want the reader to expe-
rience the story almost as if he were living it along with the
­narrator and perhaps identify with one or more characters. The
writer can choose temporal distance (as in presenting events as
past or even future) or spatial distance (how far from events the
writer is “standing” as she tells the story). These kinds of decisions
can suggest affiliations and relationships among author, narrator,
and characters. Concrete detail, scene, and interior monologues
by characters can be used to achieve a feeling of closeness. Abstract
nouns, summaries, and apparent objectivity can make the reader
feel detached from a character or event (Burroway, 2003). Both
effects can be achieved simultaneously by using a combination of
techniques. For example, Wolff speaks coolly and from a distance
in his generalizations between scenes. But the scenes themselves,
particularly those with dialogue, make the reader feel as if he
hears and sees what the characters are doing and perceiving.
Because of the conventions of education research, researchers
tend to write as if they were viewing events from a great distance.
For example, they use interview segments of disembodied voices,
out of context and depersonalized. In the past, researchers often
used passive third person, as if to convey to the reader a sense
that no human being had a hand in the study. Choosing a dis-
tant position suggests an intention to portray oneself as objec-
tive, rational, disinterested, and thus scientific. But this is only
one of several choices that researchers can make. Choosing less
authorial distance brings readers directly to the scene, as they
“hear the characters’ heavy breathing and smell their emotional
anguish. Readers feel so close to the characters that, for those
magical moments, they become those characters” (Burroway,
2003, p. 289).
Heavy breathing is evident in this excerpt from Wolff ’s (1989)
narrative. In advance of his mother’s marriage, Jack was sent
ahead to live with Dwight. Dwight was attentive, charming, and
jovial toward him while wooing Jack’s mother. But there is an
undercurrent that Jack alone detects:
X.
Dwight made a study of me. He thought about me during the day
while he grunted over the engines of trucks and generators, and in
the evening while he watched me eat, and late at night while he
sat heavy-lidded at the kitchen table with a pint of Old Crow and
a package of Camels to support him in his deliberations. He
shared his findings as they came to him. The trouble with me was,
I thought I was smarter than everybody else. The trouble with me
was, I thought other people couldn’t tell what I was thinking. The
trouble with me was, I didn’t think. . . . The trouble with me was
that I had too much free time. Dwight fixed that. (p. 95)
In this excerpt, the narrator seems to play with authorial distance.
The scene reads as if it were in the immediate present—the here
and now. Yet the reader also can discern that it was written as an
adult, from the distance of years. The adolescent sensibilities are
sustained, but the reader knows the focal character has survived
and reflected on his earlier experiences.
584 educational Researcher
Authorial distance can be used in narrative research to accom-
plish various effects. Like other literary elements, it should be
used with purpose.
Tone
Narrative researchers use tone to “match, emphasize, alter or con-
tradict the meaning of words. . . . As author, you manipulate
intensity and value in your choice of language, sometimes match-
ing meaning, sometimes contradicting, sometimes overstating,
sometimes understating, to indicate your attitude to the reader”
(Burroway, 2003, pp. 292–293). In the following excerpt, Vicki
uses ironic humor to describe the location of the ESL classes—in
the darkest corners of the school—and recognizes the signifi-
cance of that placement:
XI.
So this is me my first day of school. I’m carrying my schedule,
looking for room G-13, thinking, where the hell is this place? I’m
walking down H, walking up and down Upper G, not finding it,
and then I notice the stairs on the far corner. I can’t help it. I start
to laugh. I mean could they have put ESL any further away from
the office? So then I go down the stairs and I still can’t find it. So
I finally ask a security guard, and he’s like, “G-13? That’s the
mechanic shop!” And he points to another set of stairs, and a
door, about midway down and on the left. I laugh again. You
know they put ESL in the dreariest, darkest place they could
find, hiding them like a pair of dirty socks. They say, “That’s your
classroom. Walk past the transmission, then turn left at the axle.
DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING!” They put them where the
white kids go to trade school, you know? And I’m thinking,
great, can their place at Northwest be made any clearer? (Coulter,
2003, p. 5)
From the data as a whole presented in other parts of Coulter’s
narrative, the reader understands that Vicki’s humorous tone
contradicts the anger she feels that ESL has been assigned class-
room space in the mechanic shop. Tone evokes emotion and
mood. The tone of the telling can evoke any emotion that fits
what the writer is trying to accomplish. A tone that matches the
narrative helps to tell the story. A tone that contradicts the narra-
tive can evoke distrust in the reader that suggests the uncertainty
and complexity of the underlying events and multiple points of
view and attitudes about them.
Richardson (1985) uses tone to offset her choice of the omni-
scient third person in her writing of The New Other Woman:
Tone is revealed in many different ways, such as choice of meta-
phors, organization of material, how a quotation of a person’s
experience is framed and treated by the narrator, what and how
much the narrator lets who say and so on. Tone, consequently,
becomes a way for the omniscient writers of qualitative research
to accomplish two interlocking tasks: reduction of their authority
over writing for others, and amplification of their credibility as
writers of interpretive social science. (p. 39)
Metaphor, Figurative Language, and Theme
Use of a unifying metaphor and figurative language increases the
chance of provoking intellectual and emotional responses on the
part of readers. In Vicki’s account just presented, a metaphor
comes out of her mouth and Coulter needs only to select it as part
of the account. “DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING” is more than
just a statement about the equipment in the shop. It points to
the larger meaning that these students may not intrude on the
precious culture of Northwest High. Bowden uses figurative
language to bring the reader into the complexities and ambiguity
of the story:
XII.
Listen . . . and you can hear them whispering a fable. Look and
you can glimpse the shadows darting down the midnight streets.
. . . In the summer of 2002, the new reform government of
Mexico opened the secret files, accumulated by the state between
1952 and 1985. . . . The secret files for this period number eighty
million. They hold the screams of interrogations, the taps on
phones, the details of executions and hidden graves. . . . People
line up in the streets of Mexico City to glimpse these secret files.
They are searching for their own lives and the lives of husbands,
wives, sons, daughters, and lovers who have vanished as if they
had never existed. Of course there are limits to what people can
find out. . . . And then there is an additional barrier, the millions
of files accumulated by the U.S. government on the killings and
tortures, files that remain sealed. . . . files that chronicle the inti-
mate connection between the United States government and the
slaughter. . . . Grab a shovel, the work begins. Come, down by the
river, the dead speak. (Bowden, 2004, p. ii)
In the remainder of his book, Bowden does not so much conjure
metaphors as unpack those that are commonly used. He shows
how abstractions and circumlocutions (such as “the war on
drugs,” “drug czar,” “globalization,” or “free trade”) distract and
confuse readers and keep them from looking at unpleasant
details, especially those that connect with their own lives. He
admits, “I can’t even produce a metaphor for the drug world any-
more. I don’t even like the phrase. . . . It implies that it is a sepa-
rate world” (p. xx).
Constructing a narrative almost always involves invoking some
theme or moral. Themes that emerge from data can be alluded
to—never named explicitly or asserted directly. The following
excerpt from Darek’s story introduces an allusive theme:
XIII.
We were crossing the parking lot to the gym when Jason drove up
with his F 250 full of green and gold teammates. We had to step
back as he rolled his window down. . . .
“Get in, Stephens!” he said. I couldn’t move. Jason and Dirk
got out and walked over to me. They made a big show of shoving
me into the back of the truck, with Dirk pulling and Jason push-
ing. I let myself be coerced like it wasn’t my own decision, hold-
ing my ball with both hands. . . . Thai Boy just stood there and
watched, his mouth open again. I threw the basketball to him and
shrugged as we drove away. He caught the ball, hitched it on his
hip and watched us go. . . .
. . . “That’s it, Dirk! He needs a jacket!” Jason said. He stood
up and showed me his jacket. He had a big grin on his face. “Put
it on, Darek.”
“It won’t fit,” I said. I was the biggest guy on the team.
“Let’s check the tag, see what size it is,” Jason said. He felt
around for the tag, found it and showed it to me. It was a
handmade tag that said, “Welcome to the team, Darek!” in
bubble letters. It looked like a girl’s handwriting. . . .
. . . I drove in the cab on the way back, watching the clock. I
couldn’t afford another tardy. Jason noticed me looking at the
clock.
“Don’t worry about it Darek. Like I said, you’re one of us now.
Just wear your jacket to class.”
“Yeah, it’s a magic jacket,” said Dirk, waving his hands in the
air. “You magically walk in on time even if you’re late.”
“But you gotta walk right, Darek. Walk in like you own the
place.” (Coulter, 2009, p. 22)
Throughout Darek’s story, the basketball symbolizes membership
and identity. When he throws the ball back to Thai Boy and joins
his new football buddies, a symbolic act has occurred. Coulter
wanted to convey the sense that Darek’s identification had
entered a transition without saying so directly. In the same scene,
Darek is given a letterman’s jacket by the football team, symbol-
izing a new kind of membership. The themes of access, member-
ship, and exclusion recur throughout the data in Coulter’s study.
They might have been stated discursively as warranted assertions,
but instead she implies themes through language and imagery,
hoping to create resonance, association, and empathy in the
reader, opening up possibilities for naturalistic generalization
(Stake, 1995, 2000). The purpose of narrative research is not to
provide a single definitive answer but to open up possibilities for
new questions and ways of thinking in the reader. And the success
of a piece of art, according to Eisner (1998), is the persuasiveness
of the artist’s vision.
Fiction writers consider it a mistake to let a theme determine
other elements of the writing, an approach that often results in a
text that is two-dimensional and predictable. Instead, the writing
itself should suggest themes to the reader. This poses a dilemma
for the narrative researcher who must address two communities
at once (Becker, 2007; Richardson, 1990). The scholarly com-
munity expects the report to include discursive arguments that
yield a result—a truth claim. In committing to a narrative ren-
dering, the researcher makes arguments implicit. We believe that
unifying themes should emerge through the researcher’s data
analysis and through the writing process. Using metaphors is a
means to this end. And because the narrative also serves a research
purpose, the author carefully ties symbolic language to the con-
crete details that make up everyday life in the setting of action.
Placing Action Within Scenes
Essential to story construction is to portray action performed by
actors within scenes. Storytelling requires the researcher to
describe the particulars of setting, actors, and action (Connelly &
Clandinin, 1990). In the details a text becomes compelling and
provides a vicarious experience for the reader. Scenes require rich
detail; general exposition or transitions span the time between
scenes. Setting is a vital aspect of the construction because it helps
create a close, believable telling. If the researcher was a participant
in the events, he can rely on his recollection of his experiences
(acknowledging that his own memories are imperfect). If the
researcher was not himself present as the events unfolded, he faces
difficulties in contextualizing and must compensate by relying on
multiple data sources. The researcher can retrospectively visit the
november 2009 585
place where events took place or are taking place. In addition, he
can include interview questions designed to evoke a sense of place
from the perspective of the participants. The methods of inter-
viewing proposed by Spradley (1979), for example, encourage
participants to respond at such a high level of detail that they
enable the researcher to “witness” events secondhand and thus
generate data from which scenes can be reconstructed with
­verisimilitude.
Describing the setting is only the beginning. Actions must
likewise be described at a fine level of detail and preserve the
sense of sequence and social interaction. The scenes we have
presented so far reflect both actions within scenes and charac-
ter inventories, as participants or characters throw basketballs,
dip French fries in ketchup, drink Old Crow, and smoke
Camels. The description of significant details allows readers to
imagine themselves into those scenes, which then has the effect
of creating empathy and resonance.
Time
Without representing the passage of time, an author has no nar-
rative. The narrative starts at one point and ends at another, but
the arrangement of scenes need not follow chronology. The
author can use foreshadowing techniques, flashbacks, and flash-
forwards to elicit various effects, for example, to keep the reader
interested and expectant. What does this mean for the researcher?
First, her findings have to reflect some kind of arc on which par-
ticipants move through time. She must identify key participants
and settings that can become focal points for carrying the action
forward. She must look for trajectories, plot points, and hinges
that empirically and logically reflect the lived experiences of those
she has studied. She must be able to recognize the intentions and
goals of key individuals. So many decisions follow: Where does
the story begin? How much time elapses between the beginning
and the end? How many scenes should be portrayed? How much
general description and exposition should be included at the
beginning and end and between scenes for ideal rhythm and
pace? The arrangement of scenes has an effect on the reader’s
sense of causality, contingency, and explanation (Becker, 2007).
Readers orient to earlier passages as probable explanations for
later events; thus researchers need to establish continuity, contin-
gency, and simple causality from their data before they make
sequencing decisions in developing their narratives. All these
decisions and more are needed to structure the report. The end-
ings need not conform to conventions of happy or sad endings or
even to the convention of tying up all the loose ends.
Coulter’s narrative begins with her first day at Northwest
High School, describing the way the school looks to her as she
drives toward it. She engages in an internal monologue that
establishes some of the significant events that led her here. The
second scene takes place in the principal’s office, where both she
and the ESL program are placed in a diminished role in the
school’s culture. From there, the narrative proceeds generally
toward the end of her tenure at the school. However, the scenes
in between are presented from the characters’ points of view. A
key event in most stories is the death of their friend Chansy. Each
scene has its own arc and sense of time. The overall structure of
the narrative is novelistic, with the methodology and review of
literature consigned to appendixes.
586 educational Researcher
The structures of Wolff ’s and Wolcott’s narratives follow a
fairly straightforward path, with the sequence of scenes reflecting
the chronology of events in that part of their lives. Wolff begins
at the point when he and his mother broke away from their for-
mer circumstances. At that point he had intended to become a
different person and signaled that by renaming himself. The
starting point Wolff has chosen implies that his purpose is not to
present his whole life story but to encompass a period in his life
when his sense of self was most at risk and might have gone in a
very different direction. The story ends with his enlistment in the
army. He dispenses with his college years in a few pages and his
enlistment in a single line of text. His tone then changes to one
of brief and simple exposition. However, this alteration in pace
and tone still leaves room for multiple interpretations on the
readers’ part.
Wolcott divides his narrative into segments. The first begins
with his discovery of Brad on his property. He then considers his
decision to conduct an ethnographic study with Brad as his sub-
ject. He describes his research methods and then presents seg-
ments of data organized in themes, such as “getting paid for
dropping out” and “I’m not going to get caught.”
After the preamble quoted earlier, in Excerpt XIII, Bowden
presents another beginning, and then another, before he tells the
story of the unsolved murder and all its connections to the drug
war. He also fails to end the narrative in a way that we might
expect, thus showing that there is no real ending and no final
understanding of the events he has narrated.
Whatever the researcher’s approach to structuring time in a
narrative construction, the structure serves as a cohesive element
throughout the report, tying together elements and perspectives
and providing temporal context for the audience.
The literary elements described in this section interact with
each other in complex ways, posing countless combinations of
decisions for the researcher regarding how to manipulate the text.
The aim is to achieve various responses in readers without chang-
ing the underlying story,7 which itself is the result of evidence and
analysis.
Narrative, Narrative Research, Evidence, and Truth
We conclude this article with some remarks on intersections,
fractures, and continuities in the practice and theory space of
narrative research.
Narrative and Qualitative Research: Evidence and Analysis
Unlike those who draw sharp boundaries around narrative
research, differentiating narrative research from qualitative
research, we argue for continuities. We see commonalities in how
evidence is generated—through interviews with participants,
detailed observation of the participants’ social worlds, searches of
archives—by researchers immersing themselves over the long
term in those social worlds. All this research is done in the service
of revealing as many aspects of those worlds as possible, from as
many perspectives as possible, recognizing that any one perspec-
tive will be inadequate. Narrative researchers and qualitative
researchers share an orientation to data analysis as a complex
transaction between researcher and evidence, the ends of which
are provisional and fallible. Both probe the themes, hypotheses,
categories, and assertions that emerge from analysis to see how
they stand up to the weight of evidence and counterclaims. Both
judge their work on characteristics of verisimilitude, fidelity,
coherence, plausibility, usefulness, and evidentiary warrant. They
seek to test their accounts with participants and peers.
At the moment of preparing representations of their work,
however, the paths of narrative and qualitative researchers are
likely to diverge. Narrative researchers use literary devices such as
we have described to develop time- and process-oriented
accounts. They are less likely than qualitative researchers to use
discursive logic to frame their descriptions of the social worlds of
their participants. They do not usually state explicitly the themes
they have discovered, or reveal the methods they have used, pre-
ferring to let the narratives stand on their own literary merits.
Narrative researchers allow multiple interpretations to emerge,
yet hope to persuade readers by their artistic visions (Eisner,
1981, 1998). In contrast, qualitative researchers are more likely
to mingle discursive arguments with descriptions, case studies,
and vignettes.
We also see commonalities in the ways that qualitative and nar-
rative researchers analyze evidence and choose what parts of the
evidence will go into their representations. To support our view, we
first describe in cryptic terms how an interpretivist qualitative
researcher goes about the process. For Erickson (1986), a good
interpretivist researcher analyzes evidence as follows: He reads and
rereads the body of evidence as a whole; generates preliminary asser-
tions (specific statements of what he believes to be true) by inductive
means; warrants each assertion by first assembling all segments of
data that confirm the assertion, assembling all the data segments
that seem to disconfirm the assertion; examines extreme cases for
how they shed light on patterns; weighs the evidence, discarding or
redefining assertions that do not stand up to the warranting process;
looks for an organization system that links assertions to one another
(e.g., hierarchies or processes); for each surviving assertion, con-
structs a vignette, something like a short story with actors, settings,
and an arc that demonstrates the truth of the assertion in narrative
form; and frames assertions and vignettes in interpretive commen-
tary, with general and particular data.
Erickson recognizes that the generating and warranting of
assertions does not follow a formula or rule. Rather, he promotes
the idea of bounded rationality: The researcher makes decisions
and choices about the course of data generation and analysis with
the best thinking at his disposal, critiquing these decisions, exam-
ining their consequences, and making the process fully transpar-
ent to readers. Similarly, in choosing what evidence to draw on in
writing vignettes, the interpretivist researcher has no algorithm to
follow. In practice, the event that is transposed into a vignette is
often representative of a larger set of confirming data instances.
It is representative not in the statistical sense but in being typical,
and perhaps a vivid example, of the larger set of events that war-
rant the assertion. Researchers in this model (Graue & Walsh,
1998) discuss the practice of writing a vignette as a composite of
material from more than a single observed event, or with com-
posite characters; they also reveal the crafting decisions in what
Erickson (1986) termed “the life history of the study.”8
Compare Erickson’s model of analytic induction with
Polkinghorne’s method of narrative explanation.9 Again in cryp-
tic form, the narrative researcher begins by developing a story
from the database and configuring it into an emplotted account
(Polkinghorne, 1995, 2007). The researcher tests the evolving
story with the database. When the data conflict with the evolving
story, or when there are contradictions, the researcher changes
the configuration of the story. Recursive movements are made
between the evolving story and the database until the plot begins
to take form. As this happens, the researcher is able to decide
what events and data elements need to be included in the final
account. The evolving story embodies the data and correspond-
ing analysis.
Clearly, there are many continuities and areas of convergence
among narrative research and qualitative research studies.
Narrative and Fiction
Education research generalists worry about whether the word nar-
rative implies fiction. They argue that readers of a text called research
have legitimate demands for texts that are factual and, by ordinary
standards, true. If an author or researcher departs from the literal
facts as known, readers rightfully expect some declaration of how
she went about such departures and where those appear in the text.
Such declarations make it possible for the reader to decide how to
come to grips with the text and find it credible. In postmodern
novels, however, such declarations are omitted. The author uses
literary devices as cues that something nonliteral is going on. In
O’Brien’s (1999) novel Going After Cacciato, the narrative begins
with realist trappings. Suddenly the reader becomes aware that the
author is playing tricks with time, place, and causality, creating a
realm of magical realism. As we described earlier, Bowden varies his
approach from section to section, veering from realism to dream
states to something like poetry.
Although narrative research and fiction may share some liter-
ary techniques, narrative research accounts are renderings of the
results of research (data collected in multiple forms, analyzed, and
reported) in which the researcher balances the interests of story-
telling against the inclusion of every literal detail uncovered in
her research. For example, she renders two research participants
as a single character or reworks two equivalent incidents into a
single scene. Although such constructions are sometimes called
fictionalizing, we believe such a label furthers the confusion; we
prefer the terms reworking, rendering, or crafting. We argue that
the purposes of research are not antithetical to the purposes of
narrative, which include keeping the reader reading to the last
page, and that the use of literary elements helps the process.
Skeptics of crafting must consider how even strong and formulaic
quantitative studies exhibit additions and subtractions and sel-
dom tell the whole story: Interventions are rarely described in
sufficient detail for replication; few sampling designs are executed
as originally intended; the personal stake and ideology of research-
ers are rarely noted. Researchers transform their materials accord-
ing to conventions at every stage of the research process (Becker,
2007), corresponding to the purposes of their studies. Moreover,
the reports of conventional research—much as researchers in that
tradition would like to persuade readers otherwise—are them-
selves narratives (Barone, 2001c; Richardson, 1990).
Geertz (1973) summed up this view: “Anthropological writ-
ings are themselves interpretations, and . . . they are, thus, fic-
tions; fictions, in the sense that they are ‘something made,’
‘something fashioned’ . . . not that they are false, unfactual, or
merely ‘as if ’ thought experiments” (p. 15).
november 2009 587
Truth and Narrative Research
Most of the literature on narrative research in education, which
is sampled in our first section, is focused on drawing a sharp
distinction between narrative research and other forms of social
science, both quantitative and qualitative.10 This literature
focuses on positivism as the canonical difference between narra-
tive research and methodologies in similar terrain. Positivism
assumes that a real world exists separate from perceptions and
interpretations of it. Positivism also assumes that a single truth
can be found about the social world and that science demands the
pursuit of this truth through objective methods. In contrast, the
dominant stream of narrative research theory in education denies
the existence of a single, external reality and declares that the
establishment of objective methods and single, definitive knowl-
edge claims is therefore impossible. Instead, narrative researchers
emphasize constructing accounts of participants’ subjective expe-
rience and pursue particular rather than general understandings
of phenomena. To understand participants’ subjective experi-
ence, researchers cannot rely on rule- and technology-governed
procedures and methods. Knowledge is constructed through
transactions among researchers, participants, evidence, and the
social context.
The emphasis on this canonical division of positivist-informed
traditional research versus narrative research has consequences.
The first is that advocates for narrative research tend to downplay
and even decry11 projects that search for factual knowledge and
understanding of the social world. Epistemologies of social and
historical realism, to name two alternative theories of research,
assume that a real world exists but deny the ability of human
researchers to capture a singular truth about it. They deny the
possibility that any single method or perspective might capture the
full complexity of human and social life, and they include as nec-
essary the subjective experiences of participants’ lives. They treat
participants’ actions as the result of their definitions of the situa-
tion, their motives, and their intentions. In these epistemologies,
the orientation to knowledge claims is that such claims are flawed,
provisional, and partial, although they do, at least in part, reflect
some aspect of the social world before them, much in the way that
maps model territory, despite inadequacies in technical methods
of measurement and background knowledge.12 Except for this last
feature, the assumptions of these epistemologies are not unlike
those embraced by narrative research theories in education.13
A further consequence is to mark off as legitimate the work of
author–researchers such as Wolcott (2002), Rose (1995), and
Kozol (1991), who intend to write the warranted but still imper-
fect truth about their research topics, using narrative forms.
The third consequence of canonically divided literature is a
downplaying of what a narrative is. Current publications in nar-
rative research devote only a few pages to defining narrative in
any way familiar to narrative theory in literary criticism (see,
e.g., Bal, 1997). Finally, the postmodern denial of reality, truth,
and truth-seeking abdicates the responsibility of researchers to
act as witnesses to the conditions of everyday life for people who
are silenced or abused. Susan Sontag (2003) wrote, “The reports
of the death of reality—like the death of reason . . . the death of
serious literature,” when considered in light of the effects of
wars and atrocities on individual lives, “[suggest], perversely,
588 educational Researcher
unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world” (p. 110).
In a world that punishes (writ small) English Language Learners
with anomie and marginality and (writ large) others with atroc-
ities, disappearances, and poverty, there is a need for witnesses,
however imperfect.
Notes
We would like to acknowledge the editors and anonymous reviewers
of this article for their thoughtful insights. In addition, we thank the
following readers who provided feedback on drafts: Gene Glass, David
Berliner, and the CTEL writer’s group. To the ESL students of
“Northwest” High School: Your stories continue to inspire us.
1
Space precludes discussion of narrative research as a critical and
social project and allows no more than a mention of how narratives work
to generate emotions and associations in the reader.
2
We reviewed the available literature to confirm that our article was
not redundant with sources typically accessible to education researchers
who are generalists. Of course, Clandinin and Connelly (2000),
Clandinin (2007), and Richardson (1990) all offer discussions on writ-
ing narrative research texts.
3
Also see Barone (2001c), Denzin (1992), and Richardson (1990).
4
Choosing texts for this article, that is, for rhetorical purposes, is not
the same as choosing events that will be represented in a narrative account.
5
An omniscient narrator can choose to disclose her perspective and tell
the story through the eyes of a character who, by virtue of being the sto-
ryteller, presumes to know everyone’s thoughts in retrospect. The reader
must suspend disbelief, but, at the same time, the researcher has the abil-
ity to enter her own perspective as a character, clarify her role, and even
point out to the reader that she does not know everything. Is the narrator
really O’Brien? Yes and no? Was a real person killed in the way the narra-
tor described? The reader cannot be sure. Yet the concrete detail of setting,
actors, and actions, along with the precursors and consequences of these
actions, render the narrative persuasive and coherent as a whole.
6
See Josselson (2007).
7
Bal (1997) refers to the underlying story as the fabula, which has a
fixed structure of relationships between actors, action, and time. In the
fabula of Joseph, for example, the abandonment of Joseph by his broth-
ers in the well must of necessity occur before his journey to Egypt,
although the author who translates the fabula into his own text may
choose to relate the events in an alternative order. A particular author
may choose to emphasize the brothers rather than Joseph, choosing
Benjamin as the focal character, without damaging the fabula. Different
authors may choose to emphasize different tones, actors’ intentions, and
other literary elements without affecting the fabula. The reader of this
article may apply this idea to any of the texts described here.
8In the epistemological assumptions of qualitative models such as
Erickson’s, there is no rule, no algorithm, no abstract principle other
than bounded rationality, transparency, reflection, and decision making
with the best means available to explain how material gets selected in the
representation. One draws on purpose, audience, form, discourse com-
munity, discipline, and the like. This is true for both narrative research
and qualitative research more generally and will likely never satisfy those
who believe in the possibility of objective methods, formulaic proce-
dures of inference, and definitive accounts.
9Polkinghorne’s (1995) process of narrative analysis shares many fea-
tures with Maxwell’s (2004) analysis of the causality in social life, with
Gould’s (1990) method of analysis of causal dynamics, and with the
method of process analysis used in historiography and political science
case studies.
10We introduce this idea with trepidation because we recognize as
valid the fear on the part of advocates for any new branch of methodology
that existing dominant traditions will colonize and appropriate some of
its ideas and practices without completely understanding or appreciating
what is novel and particular about them.
11The use of the term epic to describe narrative texts with omniscient
narrators and conclusive resolutions drips with irony and distaste, as
does Van Maanen’s (1988) ridicule of texts that appear objective as “real-
ist tales” (Bakhtin, 1981; Van Maanen, 1988).
12We draw here on a number of sources: Azevedo, 1997; Putnam,
1991; and Ziman, 1990.
13In addition, we might include the epistemological positions of
American pragmatism that underlie much arts-based research. See, for
example, Eisner (1981, 1998) and Stake (1995, 2000).
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AUTHORS
CATHY A. COULTER is an assistant professor in the College of
Education at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, 3211 Providence
Drive, PSB 224, Anchorage, AK 99508-4614; afcac@uaa.alaska.edu.
Her research focuses on narrative research methodologies and the experi-
ences of English learners and immigrant children in public schools.
MARY LEE SMITH is a Regents Professor in the Mary Lou Fulton
College of Education at Arizona State University, Box 872411, Tempe,
AZ 85287; mlsmith@asu.edu. She is also a consultant in research design.
Her research focuses on methodology, including integrated research,
meta-analysis, and research representation.
Manuscript received April 15, 2008
Revisions received October 28, 2008, and February 3, 2009
Accepted February 25, 2009