Narrative inquiry is a subfield still under development and not therefore fully solidified into a cohesive set of theories, methods, and procedures (Barkhuizen et al., 2014; Ghanbar et al., 2024). One could argue that narrative inquiry resists such standardization. In this way, narrative inquiry has become a refuge for scholars who have become weary of variables and the quantification of positivistic approaches (Josselson, 1993, p. xv).
3.1.1. Narrative analysis vs. Analysis of narrative
Within applied linguistics, narrative researchers often divide their subfield into two subdomains: narrative analysis and analysis of narrative (Benson, 2014; Barkhuizen et al., 2014; Barkhuizen & Consoli, 2021; Polkinghorne, 1995). Narrative analysis incorporates story or narrative-based ways of thinking into the research process – storytelling as method and presentation. In contrast, analysis of narrative largely draws from anthropological, ethnomethodological, and structuralist traditions to analyze interlocutors’ monologic, dialogic, or polyphonic narratives. Analysis of narrative, therefore, analyzes stories as data while narrative analysis constitutes stories as such.
Through the lens of narrative analysis, storytelling as a method of analysis and presentation affords methodological creativity – a convenient opportunity for researchers to explore narrative work more freely without the constraints of prescriptive methodological parameters (Barkhuizen et al., 2014). Yet Barkhuizen et al. (2014, p. 9) also caution against “an approach in which almost anything can be a story and urge narrative researchers to explain exactly what they mean by ‘story’ in their research” (see also Barkhuizen & Cansoli, 2021). De Fina and Georgakopolou (2012) therefore discuss the need for more unified methodological apparatuses as part of narrative inquiry’s self-definition. In this way, such tensions between creativity and regularization maps onto Bruner’s (1986) divide between narrative and paradigmatic modes of thought. What does it mean to present data in the form of a story within an applied linguistics scholarshipscape that often emphasizes pedagogical pragmatism – an emphasis that carries implicit pressures for generalizability and empiricism in research reports? In this way, narrative analysis approaches a paradigmatically driven field with narrative modes of thinking.
Methods of narrative analysis, therefore, range from autobiographical data (e.g. Canagarajah, 2012; Gao, 2010) a straightforward reporting of “monologic” interview data (e.g. Kim & Brutt-Griffler, 2022) to reporting of ethnographic data in the form of a scripted drama (e.g. Blackledge & Creese, 2022). Narrative analysis need not involve narrative data explicitly, however, but can also include qualitative data packaged in a story form – a format common to many ethnographies[1].
Analysis of narrative, however, entails a linguistic analysis of data segments pre-classified as “story” or “narrative.” While the following typology is oversimplified for the sake of length, I focus on three forms of analysis of narrative: (1) Structural analysis of monologic stories, (2) analysis of polyvocal stories in interaction, and (3) thematic analysis of multiple parallel yet unrelated stories.
3.1.2. Structural analysis of narrative
Structural analyses of monologic narratives often trace their roots to Labov and Waletzky (1967), who typologized the structure of participant narratives in sociolinguistic interviews into a series of rhetorical moves like abstract, orientation, complicating action, resolution, evaluation, and coda — a pattern that resembles the rising and falling action of a cinematic three-act structure (as cited in Benson, 2014; de Fina & Georgakopolou, 2012). Linguistic anthropologists also employ structuralist approaches to participants’ multilingual narratives to either (1) compare the tellings of parallel stories in multiple languages (e.g. Koven, 2007) or (2) to discuss the meaning of code-switching moves within a single multilingual narrative (e.g. Hill, 1995; Bermudez, 2020). Koven (2007), for instance, analyzes French-Portuguese bilingual participants’ tellings of the same autobiographic stories, finding that participants often adopt more formal, polite language when (re)telling in Portuguese while adopting more informal slang when (re)telling in French. This reflects participants’ patterned linguistic orientations to (1) selves raised in provincial religious villages in Portugal and (2) selves who came of age and adopted rougher, streetwise ways of speaking in French urban spaces. Hill (1995), on the other hand, analyzes how one participant’s switches between Spanish and Mexicano signal switches between distinct socioideological planes (e.g. Spanish = economics, profit, capitalism; Mexicano = rural ideological connections to land and community). Due to the monologic nature of narratives in such studies (as well as the Labovian tradition of narrative analysis [de Fina & Georgakopolou, 2012]), most rely on a univocal presentation of interview data. Many applied linguists, however, have since critiqued structuralist approaches to narrative inquiry, adopting a poststructuralist lens (e.g. Darvin & Norton, 2023; Pavlenko, 2007; Kocabaş-Gedik & Hart 2021) that challenges (1) the essentialist link between participants’ utterances and ontological truths about the world and (2) the erasure of interviewers and other community members as co-tellers of participants’ narratives.
[1] Such ethnographies include Latour & Woolgar (1986), Latour (1987), or Millerand et al. (2014) in science and technology studies – a narrative-driven field that endures analogous clashes with the paradigmatic mode of STEM thinking.
Ontogenetic Reflection
When I listen back, I’m reminded of a LinkedIn post that I read recently from Victoria Clarke, who was soliciting a dictionary definition of rigor within qualitative research. Rigor is a term that many qualitative researchers seem to employ to credibilize their work. I say “credibilize” because I use it as a verb that denotes a discursive field of intelligibility around what Lincoln and Guba initially called the trustworthiness of qualitative research. I make this a verb because, for one, credibility is not something that can be proven through logical argumentation, but rather credibility is something established in a relational encounter between a reader and a writer.
Closely associated with the notion of rigor is one of transparency. I often see this in recently published articles in applied linguistics, particularly when talking about reflexivity. On the surface, notions of rigor and transparency sound perfect. We want to read research reports that we can trust, and we want to be sure that the analysis conducted by the researcher is reflective of the data that they collected — that they captured — and that there’s a reflexive transparency of how the identity and life story, or life capital, as Sal Consoli puts it, of the researcher contributed to the production of the research report that readers read.
Credibility is therefore something that must be established and argued through writing. And while transparency can be analogized to other political domains, such as having election watchdogs or a free press with access to privileged political events, this does not exist in narrative inquiry beyond perhaps the direct study team. I therefore wonder if trustworthiness is achieved not through the felt sensemaking experience between a reader and a writer, but rather through the adherence to conventions — a credibility checklist, so to speak. This is why positionality statements are now receiving the proper problematization that is required to move narrative inquiry beyond its scientific purview.
After all, if we want to conduct narrative analyses, or analyses of narrative, it seems more sensible to adopt the identity not of a researcher but of a storyteller. And yes, storytellers also have their own criteria of credibility. Trustworthiness is not established by a linear list of analytical moves — analytical moves that may or may not have actually occurred — but rather by the reader’s subjective judgment of the presentation of analysis. In other words, it’s one thing for a researcher to claim in their method section that they treated their participants’ stories with respect and care; it’s another thing to read an analysis that demonstrates the treating of stories with ethics and care.
I think this is a particularly important point at a time when narrative inquiry is gaining more and more traction within the field of applied linguistics, and we have one party aiming to standardize the practice in order to advocate for its scientific legitimacy, while another camp — the camp that I reflexively admit to belonging to — views storytelling in opposition to a positivist mode of presentation conventionalized within the natural sciences. In other words, if we are so bold to adopt a methodological frame like narrative inquiry, why would we then hamstring ourselves with the limitations of a positivist scientific paradigm?
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