Narrative Inquiry as the Most Suitable Research Method for the Thesis

We live in deeds not years; in thoughts, not breaths;

In feelings, not in figures on a dial.

We should count time by heart throbs. He most lives Who thinks most - feels the noblest - acts the best

P.J. Bailey (1816-1902) Festus

In this section I will try to give an explanation and noteworthy arguments for choosing narrative inquiry as a research method and demonstrate it to be the most suitable choice for the phenomenon described in the dissertation. However, it is still a challenge to find a single source that would comprehensively explain how researchers should use narrative as a research method. (Webster, Mertova, 2007)

The questions are: How can science and humanities benefit from biographical narrative methods? Why is this method most suitable for illuminating an individual’s experience and the meaning of that experience. How can this method be regarded as a valid way, in scientific terms, of providing reliable and verifiable outcomes?

The explanation I shall give here is just a concept; a voice in broader discussion, not the ready answer or conclusion.

Narrative is a story; a story which has an author, a subject, and a more or less informed motive, or purpose, to justify the need to tell the story. Biography on the other hand relates to the course of life of a particular person. It might be in a form of written text as

an account of this life course. When the individual reports his own story, we call it an auto biography. It is assumed that each narrative (or auto narrative) is anchored in the author biography, because it relates to his/her own past and present experiences. The term narrative-biographical indicates that the source of data, which is narrative inquiry and a subject of reference, is the individual’s biography.

The individual biography is like an image of the personal life trajectory. It reflects in this sense the social capabilities and the social barriers, which had, or had not, been overcome by a particular person, through her own determination or a lucky set of circumstances.

Narrative inquiry is always like an open question - it pictures an individual as someone who is constantly on his way, transforming, changing. In rapidly changing societies, in constant flux, the meaningful question for the individual is how do they cope with this situation? The research perspective informs us how the individual finds his sense of self-identity and asks how he can orient himself in a complex system, which is what the outside world is. How possible it is to provide consistent actions in the incoherent world, under the influence of conflicting stimuli?

The explicit purpose of biographical narrative inquiry is to find the explanation and reconstruction of the rules and principles to create structures, which are the foundations of the human agency. It is not so important why people behave in a particular way, but more important to find out what the biographical implications are, and what experiences and processes have influenced that action. The important thing is to understand the rules and principles adopted by the person, on even the conscious or unconscious level. The change, transformation in the individual perspective is also the reflection of the transformation of the social system. In this methodological perspective most important is description of the state of the affairs than its evaluation.

Developing biographical narrative interviews can allow the researcher to capture in depth the dialectics of agency and structure in the learning experience in higher education. ‘Biographical narratives also illustrate the dynamics and influence of past lives in initial schooling, family and work in constructing present and future lives as an HE student’ (Merrill and West, 2009, West, Alheit, Andersen& Merrill, 2007)

‘Biographies, although individual, also illuminate the collectivities and shared

experiences in people’s lives through issues such as gender, class and race’ (Merrill, 2007).

Another important issue is that the biographical narrative has the ability to link the macro and micro worlds. We can say that it:

…offers many examples of the wealth of biographical and life history research, and its unique potential to illuminate people’s lives and their interaction with the social world and the interplay of history and micro worlds, in struggles for agency and meaning in lives. And to illuminate the interplay of different experiences and forms of learning – from the most intimate to the most formal (West, Alheit, Andersen& Merrill, 2007, p.280).

My research focuses on the students’ experiences and perspectives, and how they perceive themselves as students. It concludes later with their transformation and changing perspectives on life - and labour market - as well as life stability.

The significant theme here is human reflexivity. What I mean with the expression is the fact that the human being can adopt a position towards the socially expected forms of individual and collective existence. The world and the self are not just given structures but they become through our perception and experience.

The constituted view is the result of human interpretation and it can be reinforced, diminished or changed during the life span. The very basis for selection and creation of symbols to construct reality is continually accumulated knowledge about the material and intangible reality and values internalized during everyday experiences. New knowledge and new experience, appearing in the biographically new life circumstances, are being constantly compared and confronted with the already stored images of the self and the world around. The fragmentary experiences are being related to the totality of ideas and representation and being transformed into new structure. (Urbaniak-Zając in Koczanowicz, Nahirny & Włodarczyk, 2005, p. 122) Bourdieu’s habitus locates person within the wider social space and in relation to others. He also recognises that this can be transformed through the use of agency:

Habitus is not the fate that some people read into it. Being the product of history, it is an open system of dispositions that is constantly subjected to experiences, and therefore constantly affected by them in a way that either reinforces or modifies its structures (Bourdieu in Bourdieu and Wacquant.1992, p. 133).

The self is a product of what the person considers as his life in the terms of his own history. In our own history/biography we are constantly drawing and redrawing our past and our future. ‘Me’ and ‘my’ history are inseparable. The identity is the construction, which adopts the form of history represented in a personal narrative. At particular times

in an individual’s biography, agency may be more dominant, for example when making the decision to study abroad. While interpreting the biographical data, the problem of objectivity is raised. When analysing data, what is really important is fruitfulness and transparency of interpretation. My understanding of fruitful interpretation is sensitive, far-reaching understanding as well as critical consideration. In other words it is both the trust in what the interviewee is trying to express and also some distance to what has been said. Interpretation is like the conversation with the written text, with the transcript of what has been said. (Urbaniak-Zając in Koczanowicz, Nahirny, Włodarczyk, 2005, p. 126).

An indispensable component of the ability to read the data gathered through the interview process is the researcher’s systematic reflection on their own inquiry practice.

The documentation of every stage of the research process seems to be essential.

The narrative investigation is about presenting the human agency against the background of the conditions and circumstances he happened to exist in; it is about expressing his actions along with their meaning, significance and implications. The point is to understand the single individual with reference to his daily world of experience and to recreate, as much as it is possible, his/her biographical becoming.

There is a common argument against narrative research in science, which is that it does not produce any conclusions of certainty, in contrast to what traditional approaches would provide. As Webster argues, narrative does not claim to represent the ‘exact truth, but rather aims for verisimilitude – that the results have the appearance of truth or reality’ (Webster & Mertova, 2007, p.4). The empirical methods approach, that summarises the experience and issues surrounding it by the use of statistical figures, is very limiting and insufficient to express the complicity and broadness of the researched phenomenon.

Quantitative research is typically looking for outcomes and frequently overlooks the impact of experience, while narrative inquiry allows researchers to get an understanding of that experience….Narrative is not an objective reconstruction of life – it is a rendition of how life is perceived. (Webster & Mertova, 2007, pp.3, 5)

The growing interest in qualitative methodology, and its suitability for research purposes, can also be explained with the epistemological concept of truth, which changes while moving from the modernist to postmodernist perspective. This means that what has been previously argued, that is ‘how we know whatever we know’ was taken from the objective and ultimate truth, is now rather recognised and interpreted in

the light of ‘subjective, multiple truths’, as postmodernism itself relates to the human-centred holistic perspective. (Webster, 1994, pp.6, 11, Merrill 1996, Reeves 1996). The advantage of the narrative method is its ability to communicate and explore both the internal and external experiences of human beings. What is also maybe even most important for the task of illuminating the perceptions of people in transition, is the narrative method capability of encompassing factors of time and communication in change, which are fundamental in dealing with human centeredness and complexity of real life experiences with connections with the individual’s worldview. Narrative provides a means to investigate the individual’s inner experience of human activity, so it becomes the postmodern tool to explore in a more sensitive way ‘the subtle textures of thought and feeling, which are not readily accessible in more standard forms of research’ (Gough, 1994, in Webster, p.7).

Narrative is the concept I was working with, and it has been chosen as the most useful tool in encompassing the transitions my respondents were/are going through, as well as being a way of attempting to access that sequence of events in people’s lives. It was the best tool to explain the phenomenon of triple or even multiple transitions, connecting past with present and future.

Why have I chosen narrative as a form of my research? I want to explore the story of each participant, their own history and narrative. Their stories are in a process of becoming, being created in a present moment. Individuals are always in the process of becoming, of creating themselves. According to Tedder and Biesta what makes a story a narrative is a plot (Tedder and Biesta, 2007). Narrative inquiry is the best way to let the respondent decide what part of herself she is going to share with me, what identity position she has adopted and what are the most important elements in the story. I am aware that the interviews deviate from the questions and go in a different direction.

“The purpose is to see how respondents in interviews impose order on the flow of experience to make sense of events and actions in their lives.”(Riessman, 1993, p.2).

There is also something about me that makes me feel comfortable about the narrative.

The journey through this research starts with my own experience, as a person split between two countries, having the experience of working and learning in both of them. I can identify very well with this position because I am bilingual, I am an immigrant, who struggles to merge into a new culture, to find a place like home in another country. I can understand, more than anyone else, how it feels to move to a different culture, to be a

stranger in a workplace, in a society, and to struggle with the language acquisition. I can perceive things more clearly from the Polish minority perspective. I have witnessed all of the most recent economic and social changes taking place in Poland and I can understand the way these are shaping the Polish immigrant’s identity and attitudes.

My family roots are in Poland, but also in the Ukraine, where my grandmother comes from. I have been part of multinational discussions within the family settings since my very early childhood. My own history and my background as an international person puts me in a position of multinational perspective and gives me a more sensitive sense of empathy with similar experiences of others.

I had an open and exploratory attitude to the questions I was asking. As the researcher, I am trying to reflect critically on the theory I am using as my starting framework. I am also very flexible and open minded in accordance to young adults’ experiences.

In Polish students’ narratives presented by me, there are some commonalities, but the way they have built their plots is different.

During the first analysis stage there can not be the formal and closed conclusion, only the early interpretations which may be redirected as a results of other peoples narrative’s impact. Each new narrative may change the way other were understood because of the new social dimensions they bring together (Nizinska, 2009).

Allheit highlights the presence of social elements in individual stories, which gives a story teller “socially viable lifeworld perspective for guiding their actions” (Allheit 2005, p.209).

I have begun my research with interrogating the learning and transition processes in my respondents’ lives, through posing the following questions:

What is the relation between studying abroad and the sense of stabilization and security in life? How does studying abroad influence the sense of identity of young people? Why is the education system in Ireland attractive to foreign students? What are students coming from post communist countries looking for in a foreign country? What are their motives to study abroad? Why are they choosing Ireland?

I had the list of research questions, (see attached in Appendix), which were used to initiate discussion with no intention to meet all the answers. The stories were evolving their own way and each narrative was different and influenced the research in a different way.

Those questions were to help me to explore connections and influences of learning, and transitions in their lives. In the final chapter I draw some indicatory conclusions of my findings and argue that biographical and narrative methods are necessary for understanding learning and changing perspectives through the transitions in the life course. Life, work and learning are reciprocally permeating to create the biographical entity. The above is being created by individuals’ experiences and transformations, which would not be possible to come into existence without all those mentioned components. My dissertation deals with not only learning in HE institutions, but also with the social spheres interconnected with it. It articulates the stories of the people who could be marginalized in traditional forms of research; but what seems crucial is that their stories are enabling me to develop a more ‘nuanced understanding of learning and educational processes’ (Tedder and Biesta, 2007) in the cross-cultural context. It also provides the possibility to discover ‘unexpected experiences and surprising transformations that in many cases are not foreseen by the learner himself’ (Alheit and Dausien, 2002, p.16).

Higher education is a space where people can acquire knowledge and credentials marked as employability outcomes. Education also has a role to play in providing space for them to reflect on their lives - and their meanings - and identify opportunities for further development (Tedder and Biesta, 2007, p.10).

Alheit (1995) noticed also the possibility of discovering by both teacher and learner the

‘opportunities for shaping social, occupational and political existence more autonomously’ (Alheit, 1995, p.68). Tedder and Biesta point out another important component enabling an understanding of the significance of transitions in learning, which is the ‘space of opportunity’ available to those people assessed and their

‘instruments for individual self-management’ (Tedder and Biesta, 2007, p.2).

The transitions are important. They are not only the mark of a new career turn. They also give the confidence and self-assurance to adapt to new circumstances. They have significance for the ‘maintenance and development of the self’ (Tedder and Biesta, 2007, p.6). The interesting question about the young people who have already gone through many transitions, having taken the challenge, is: Would they be more inclined to take a similar risk later on?