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From: harsha
Date: 10/9/01
Time: 9:00:44 AM
Remote Name: 196.21.162.250
Dear Kenneth
Thank you for your comment i am going to address some of the issues now in the best way i can and will come back to you if i think of more things to share i consider myself as novice and narrative research has opened up more avenues for questioning than i ever imagined. I do remember our previous communication -you had begun the the project as research-i agree that to do reductionistic analyses does really lose richness. Therefore the strength in the way i have approached it is to retain narrative structure at the data collection and data representation levels. i.e. the result of the project is also a story but to answer specific questions that the researcher might have.
a story on its own is powerful but does not constitute research unless theorised - although this is also contested.
The issues of distorting the meaning is an important one that can be managed in a variety of ways. The way in which i have managed this is to allow the participant to provide me with feedback regarding whether this is an authentic representation of his story However an important aspect to bear in mind that the story or meaning-making process is a co-construction between the researcher and participant his story does not have meaning until i interpret it- one of the values is that the story may have multiple interpretations because it is not intended to produce hard facts- the reader of any story is also the interpreter- just as the researcher in any study chooses how he wants to interpret his data- extending on some aspects - therefore any two researchers can never generate the identical outcomes even if asking the same questions- research is a human process and all knowledge is tentative
also the project is interested in subjective knowledges - so the characterisation often portrays what the participant wants to tell - the researcher may construct the story to signal this intention but will also capture ambiguities and nuances in the construction of the story -the researcher then has the responsibility to point out the contradictions or possibilities for alternative representations.
as readers make different and multiple meanings of texts so too can the researcher- the researcher may ask other researchers to offer their comment as a check for convergence or divergence if ideas - like we may all see different things when we read graphs-
true meaning does not exist - all meaning is constructed - the issue of misrepresentation is ofcourse an ethical issue and that is a whole other debate
The difficulty with making sense of narrative from a traditional perspective is that they have fundamentally different beliefs and assumptions about the nature of research - the issues of credibility however etc must be raised when engaging with research of any nature.