Validity Issues in Narrative Research

ion required to make use of the concepts and words offered by a language. To the extent that a language allows metaphorical and analogical expressions, descriptions convey more of felt meaning’s complexity 480 Qualitative Inquiry at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 13, 2016 qix.sagepub.com Downloaded from than do literal expressions. Interviewers can assist participants to display the intricacy of their experiences by encouraging the use of figurative expressions. (Ricoeur, 1984, proposed that the narrative form itself is a figurative, not literal, expression.) 2. Another reason that felt meanings about a situation are always greater than what can be said about them is that not all of the meaning one has about a situation is available in awareness. Experienced meaning is not simply a surface phenomenon; it permeates through the body and psyche of participants. However, participants are able to articulate only that portion of meaning that they can access through reflection. As Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962) described it, it is as if participants are asked to shine the light of reflection into a well. The light only carries so far, and the well is deeper than the light can penetrate. This deeper portion remains in the dark and, thus, cannot be observed. Freud, among others, has drawn attention to the unconscious and preconscious dimensions of experiential meaning. Interviewers can help participants bring more of their experienced meaning into awareness than appears in an initial reflection. If a participant stays with his or her reflective gaze, deeper aspects of the experience will begin to appear in awareness and become reportable. Thus, interviewers need to allow time for participants to explore reflectively their felt meanings. Participants are more in touch with the meaning of their life situations than is first apparent. Focused listening and exploration can bring to the fore more of the intricate multiplicity of an experienced meaning. 3. People are often resistant to revealing self-explorations of their feelings and understandings to others, especially strangers. What is revealed is frequently meant to project a positive self-image to others; thus, participants’ descriptions may have filtered out those parts of their experiences that they want to keep to themselves or that they believe will present a socially undesirable self-portrait. In many instances, however, participants will be more open to sharing their experienced meanings if they trust that the interviewer is open to accept their felt meanings without judgment. Seidman (1991) holds that it is difficult to overcome the hesitancy of participants to reveal themselves in a single interview. He recommends that participants be interviewed at least 3 times so that over time participants can gain confidence and trust in the interviewer. Delimited responses given in the first interview, when the participant is unsure of the interviewer, may give way in later interviews to more open responses. Time between interviews also provides time for participants to reflect and deepen their subsequent responses. 4. Texts generated by interviews are not simply productions of participants. They are creations of an interaction between interviewers and participants. Polkinghorne / Validity in Narrative Research 481 at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 13, 2016 qix.sagepub.com Downloaded from The text is an artifact of the interviewer’s agenda and the tone of the interviewer’s demeanor. Mishler (1986) outlined the many ways in which interviewers affect participants’ responses. The gender, the clothing, the accent and speech pattern, among other attributes of interviewers are used by participants to read what responses are expected. Participants attend to the interviewer’s body movements and voice intonations for indications of whether their responses are acceptable. The designated roles of interviewer and participant serve to place the interviewer in charge of the course an interview follows. Because interview texts are co-created, interviewers need to guard against simply producing the texts they had expected. By assuming an open listening stance and carefully attending to the unexpected and unusual participant responses, they can assist in ensuring that the participant’s own voice is heard and the text is not primarily an interviewer’s own creation. It is the interviewer’s task to empower participants by acknowledging that they are the only ones who have access to their experienced meaning. Because stories are simulations of participants’ meaning, and not the meaning itself, these four threats to the validity of interview-generated evidence cannot be eliminated. The task of the researcher is to produce articulations that lessen the distance between what is said by participants about their experienced meaning and the experienced meaning itself. Arguments need to be presented to reviewers and readers to convince them that the ensemble of storied portrayals, although only partial, does not overly distort participants’ meaning. Confidence in the texts can be induced by researchers’ descriptions of how they dealt with the four sources of disjunction between participants’ experienced meaning and the languaged text. Validation of generated texts can also be improved by use of the iterative process of returning to participants to gain clarification and further exploration of questions that arise during the interpretative portion of the research. Also, generated texts can be given to participants for their check on whether the description captures the essential features of the meaning they felt; if it does not, they can suggest alterations or expansions of the text to more closely display their meaning. Validity of the Interpretations of Narrative Texts Not all narrative research includes an explicit interpretative section. The produced finding is held out as the stories themselves. The stories alone are 482 Qualitative Inquiry at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 13, 2016 qix.sagepub.com Downloaded from revealing enough to provide insight into the variety of lived experiences among the participants. The validity of the story is attested to by its rich detail and revealing descriptions. In narrative research that includes a section devoted to the interpretation of the assembled stories, researchers need to justify their interpretations for the reader. The general purpose of an interpretative analysis of storied texts is to deepen the reader’s understanding of the meaning conveyed in a story. An interpretation is not simply a summary or précis of a storied text. It is a commentary that uncovers and clarifies the meaning of the text. It draws out implications in the text for understanding other texts and for revealing the impact of the social and cultural setting on people’s lives. In some cases, narrative interpretation focuses on the relationships internal to a storied text by drawing out its themes and identifying the type of plot the story exemplifies; in other cases it focuses on social and cultural environment that shaped the story’s life events and the meaning attached to them. In a manner similar to the Discussion section of conventional research, narrative research extends the understanding of a story by contextualizing it. Where interpretation in conventional research offers an explanation of the implications of the results of its statistical analyses, narrative interpretation often develops implications by comparing and contrasting assembled stories with one another or with other forms of social science literature. The development of narrative interpretations is less rule derived and mechanical than that often found in conventional research. Instead, they are creative productions that stem from the researcher’s cognitive processes for recognizing patterns and similarities in texts. Schwandt (2000) noted that there are two different major positions that inform interpretation in reformists’ research. One position, which he terms the Verstehen approach, holds that “it is possible for the interpreter to transcend or break out of her or his historical circumstances in order to reproduce the meaning or intention of the actor” (p. 192). The other position, philosophical hermeneutics, holds that the interpreter encounters a text from within his or her “prejudices”; interpretation is like a conversational dialogue through which meaning is a product of interaction. The Verstehen position treats the text as an object that can be understood as the author intended. Through a process of empathic understanding the interpreter can step out of his or her present context to uncover the meaning that exists in the text. The philosophical hermeneutic position holds one cannot transcend one’s own historical and situated embeddedness; thus, textual interpretations are always perspectival. Narrative researchers engaging in interpretation will make different claims about their understanding of a text Polkinghorne / Validity in Narrative Research 483 at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 13, 2016 qix.sagepub.com Downloaded from depending on which position they take. They need to let readers know which approach informs their interpretative claims. The variety of interpretation approaches engaged in by narrative researchers has considerable overlap with the textual interpretations conducted by literary criticism (see Berman, 1988). In general, narrative researchers provide support for the validity of their interpretations in ways that are similar in kind to those used in literary criticism. For example, support for an interpretation that proposes the primary theme in the literary text Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is the tragic consequence of adolescent love. An argument for this claim requires that evidence from the text in support of the claim be cited. The argument also needs to address why passages that apparently do not support the interpretation do not serve to dispute the claim. The text from which evidence is drawn is hypothetically available to the reader for consultation. Readers should be able to retrace the steps in the argument to the text and to judge the plausibility of the offered interpretation. The claim need not assert that the interpretation proposed is the only one possible; however, researchers’ need to cogently argue that theirs is a viable interpretation grounded in the assembled texts