1. Tell Me a Story: The Use of Constructed Narratives
Tell Me a Story: The Use of Constructed Narratives in Education and Public Health
Katie Wester-Neal and Nancy Daley Moore
The University of Georgia
Department of Educational Theory and Practice & Department of Health Promotion and Behavior
Tell Me a Story: The Use of Constructed Narratives
in Education and Public Health
Katie Wester-Neal & Nancy Daley Moore
The University of Georgia
Background & Purpose
Methods & Participants
Findings: Constructed Narrative as Results
Katie brings Vygotskian sociocultural theory, which emphasizes the ways in which social, cultural, and historical factors undergird an understanding of  how humans learn, to her work with constructed narrative as a tool for data analysis. Katie’s study seeks to deepen our understanding of learning to teach. Teacher candidates in their final year of college were recruited from a university-based middle grades teacher education program as participants. During the year-long study, Katie has observed her participants as they practice teaching, conducted formal and informal interviews with them, and collected documents to explore how they are learning to teach middle grades reading. To develop a deeper sense of the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which her participants were learning to teach, Katie gleaned participants’ descriptions of these contexts from several hours of interviews and used them to create constructed narratives to better understand participants.
Nancy’s work is grounded in radical feminism, which theorizes gender as a main source of oppression among women and a woman’s body being the site where this oppression exists. Her feminist perspective commits her to privileging women’s voices as she represents participants’ experiences. Nancy’s study seeks to understand the various barriers women experience pertaining to sex, sexual relationships, and condom use and to develop a more novel approach to addressing young women’s sexual barriers. Undergraduates women attending a large university were recruited to participate in the research. During the year-long study, Nancy interviewed college women about their experiences and designed, implemented, and evaluated a program geared towards addressing gaps in knowledge and barriers women discussed in their interviews. During the interviews, women were prompted to tell their stories using the construction of a timeline. Nancy applied an analysis of narratives and narrative analysis techniques to thematically create fictionalized constructed narratives. A research journal was used to document all decisions pertaining to the constructing of the narratives including decisions about what codes and categories were combined, what quotes were included in the narratives, and what quotes were removed for the narrative and for what purpose.
Constructed narrative is a qualitative research and representation tool that allows researchers to empower participants by representing their experiences in their own words.  Participants’ words are foundational in constructed narratives, comprising the vast majority of the text. Because constructed narratives privilege participants’ words over the researcher’s words and interpretation, the researcher-participant relationship shifts as participants are placed in a more powerful position. The purpose of this poster is to highlight the theory behind constructed narrative and discuss its nature, uses, and significance as a methodological tool.
To understand the sexual barriers women face, women were encouraged to write narratives related to the following topics: how they learned about sex, birth control, safe sex, substance abuse and sex, and sexual communication. During the data analysis, Nancy created constructed narratives around these topics to represent the women’s sexual experiences and the various oppressions and acts of resistance involved in women owning their sexuality. First, each of the women’s written narratives were coded. Next, similar codes were collapsed into categories, and similar categories were collapsed into themes. Women’s quotes were then organized by theme, and narratives were constructed around each theme. When necessary, context was added to aid the flow of the narrative or help explain any ambiguous terms the women used. These constructed narratives provided a way to understand the various interlocking oppressions contributing to the many sexual barriers women faced.
Research Questions
Two research questions guided this study:
1. What is constructed narrative, and how can it be used in qualitative research?
2. Why is constructed narrative an important tool for qualitative research?
Grounding in Narrative
Discussion and Limitations
This work is grounded in narrative inquiry. Narratives provide spaces for individuals to make sense of and understand their lives and experiences (Kvale & Brinkman, 2009; Mishler, 1986). Polkinghorne (1995) defined a narrative as a story. Stories communicate human action by stringing together these actions in the form of a story complete with a beginning, main plot, characters, and an ending (Polkinghorne, 1995). In narrative inquiry, these stories can be gathered as data (Polkinghorne, 1995).
Interviews are one mode by which narratives are generated as data (Kvale & Brinkman, 2009). Through interviews, narratives provide a space for action in which both the individual telling the narrative and the individual reading the narrative might be moved to go beyond what is being told and address the experience (Mishler, 1986). Through this process, explanatory stories are produced (Polkinghorne, 1995). Participants’ experiences can be better understood through analysis of these stories.
Constructed narrative draws from these ideas. In our research projects, both authors were committed to the importance of participants’ words and wanted to stay close to these words throughout data analysis and representation. As a methodological tool, constructed narrative allowed each of us to meet that goal in two key ways. First, participants’ words--their stories as they told them--were the basis of the texts in the constructed narratives we built. Second, the different options for analysis in this narrative tradition enabled a continued focus on participants’ words.
This study of constructed narrative contributes a new methodological tool for understanding participants’ experiences and empowering them by using their words. Through the use of constructed narrative, the researchers were able to gain a better understanding of participants’ experiences with learning to teach reading and negotiating their sexual encounters. Although constructed narratives have been used to empower participants, they have their limitations. For example, narratives may attempt to place human experiences neatly into well-constructed, coherent stories. By staying close to participants’ words, we attempt to mitigate this issue and retain participants’ intended meanings and understandings.
Findings: Constructed Narrative as Analysis
Selected References
To bolster her understanding of the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which her participants were learning to teach, participants in Katie’s study were encouraged to discuss them. Katie asked, for example, about people who taught her participants about reading and teaching, the ways of being and doing with which they grew up, and their histories as teachers, learners, and readers. Katie created constructed narratives from her participants’ words about these contexts during data analysis, as a way to work with the data, understand it more deeply by generating themes, and generate further questions. To build each constructed narrative, formal and informal interviews and observations for the participants were reviewed for direct quotes about these social, cultural, and historical contexts. Then Katie arranged the quotes into paragraphs to string the events together and create a “thematic thread” (Polkinghorne, 1995, p. 5). Linking phrases, which were placed in brackets, were added to make the participants’ words more easily understandable in very limited instances. After completion, these constructed narratives allowed Katie to explore participants’ social, cultural, and historical contexts more deeply to discern themes.
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Polkinghorne, D. (1995). Narrative configuration in qualitative analysis. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 8(1), 5-23.