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Republic of the Philippines UNIVERSITY OF EASTERN PHILIPPINES University Town, Northern Samar COLLEGE OF ADVANCE STUDIES
Topic: Qualitative Approaches:
Narrative Inquiry Phenomenological Approach Case Study Approach Discussant: Faeona Ferna Joyce Molines-Balleta Program: Doctor of Arts in Language and Literature
Professor: Dr. Viginia Balanon
Narrative Research
The study of experience as a story, it entails view of the phenomenon, to adopt a particular view of experience as phenomenon under study. (Connelly & Clandinin,2006)
“Narrative” might be the term assigned to any text or discourse, or, it might be text used within the context of a mode of inquiry in qualitative research (Chase, 2005), with a specific focus on the stories told by individuals (Polkinghorne, 1995).
As Pinnegar and Daynes (2006) suggest, narrative can be both a method and the phenomenon of study.
As a method, it begins with the experiences as expressed in lived and told stories of individuals. Writers have provided ways for analyzing and understanding the stories lived and told.
“Narrative is understood as a spoken or written text giving an account of an event/action or series of events/actions, chronologically connected” (Czarniawska, 2004, p. 17).
Procedure
The procedures for implementing this research consist of focusing on studying one or two individuals, gathering data through the collection of their stories, reporting individual experiences, and chronologically ordering (or using life course stages) the meaning of those experiences.
Types of Narrative Studies
One approach to narrative research is to differentiate types of narrative research by the analytic strategies used by authors.
Polkinghorne (1995) takes this approach and distinguishes between “analysis of narratives” (p. 12), using paradigm thinking to create descriptions of themes that hold across stories or taxonomies of types of stories, and “narrative analysis,” in which researchers collect descriptions of events or happenings and then configure them into a story using a plot line. Polkinghorne (1995) goes on to emphasize the second form in his writings. More recently, Chase (2005) presents an approach closely allied with Polkinghorne’s “analysis of narratives.” Chase suggests that researchers may use paradigmatic reasons for a narrative study, such as how individuals are enabled and constrained by social resources, socially situated in interactive performances, and how narrators develop interpretations.
A second approach is to emphasize the variety of forms found in narrative research practices.
A biographical study is a form of narrative study in which the researcher writes and records the experiences of another person’s life.
Autobiography is written and recorded by the individuals who are the subject of the study (Ellis, 2004).
A life history portrays an individual’s entire life, while a personal experience story is a narrative study of an individual’s personal experience found in single or multiple episodes, private situations, or communal folklore (Denzin, 1989a).
Procedures for Conducting Narrative Research Using the approach taken by Clandinin and Connelly (2000)
As a general procedural guide, the methods of conducting a narrative study do not follow a lock-step approach, but instead represent an informal collection of topics.
- Determine if the research problem or question best fits narrative research. Narrative research is best for capturing the detailed stories or life experiences of a single life or the lives of a small number of individuals.
- Select one or more individuals who have stories or life experiences to tell, and spend considerable time with them gathering their stories through multiples types of information. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) refer to the stories as “field texts.” Research participants may record their stories in a journal or diary, or the researcher might observe the individuals and record field notes. Researchers may also collect letters sent by the individuals; assemble stories about the individuals from family members; gather documents such as memos or official correspondence about the individual; or obtain photographs, memory boxes (collection of items that trigger memories), and other personal-family-social artifacts. After examining these sources, the researcher records the individuals’ life experiences.
- Collect information about the context of these stories. Narrative researchers situate individual stories within participants’ personal experiences (their jobs, their homes), their culture (racial or ethnic), and their historical contexts (time and place).
Phenomenology
The study of the lived experiences of persons, the view that these experiences are conscious ones (van Manen, 1990), and the development of descriptions of the essences of these experiences, not explanations or analyses (Moustakas, 1994).
Describes the meaning for several individuals of their lived experiences of a concept or a phenomenon.
The basic purpose of phenomenology is to reduce individual experiences with a phenomenon to a description of the universal essence (a “grasp of the very nature of the thing,” van Manen, 1990, p. 177).
Procedure
The inquirer then collects data from persons who have experienced the phenomenon, and develops a composite description of the essence of the experience for all of the individuals. This description consists of “what” they experienced and “how” they experienced it (Moustakas, 1994).
Stewart and Mickunas (1990) emphasize four philosophical perspectives in phenomenology:
- A return to the traditional tasks of philosophy. By the end of the 19th century, philosophy had become limited to exploring a world by empirical means, which was called “scientism.” The return to the traditional tasks of philosophy that existed before philosophy became enamored with empirical science is a return to the Greek conception of philosophy as a search for wisdom.
- A philosophy without presuppositions. Phenomenology’s approach is to suspend all judgments about what is real—the “natural attitude”—until they are founded on a more certain basis. This suspension is called “epoche” by Husserl.
- The intentionality of consciousness. This idea is that consciousness is always directed toward an object. Reality of an object, then, is inextricably related to one’s consciousness of it. Thus, reality, according to Husserl, is not divided into subjects and objects, but into the dual Cartesian nature of both subjects and objects as they appear in consciousness.
- The refusal of the subject-object dichotomy. This theme flows naturally from the intentionality of consciousness. The reality of an object is only perceived within the meaning of the experience of an individual.
Two approaches to phenomenology
Hermeneutic phenomenology (van Manen, 1990) and empirical, transcendental, or psychological phenomenology (Moustakas, 1994).
hermeneutical phenomenology in which he describes research as oriented toward lived experience (phenomenology) and interpreting the “texts” of life (hermeneutics) (van Manen, 1990, p. 4).
Moustakas’s (1994) transcendental or psychological phenomenology is focused less on the interpretations of the researcher and more on a description of the experiences of participants.
Procedures
The major procedural steps in the process would be as follows:
- The researcher determines if the research problem is best examined using a phenomenological approach.
- A phenomenon of interest to study, such as anger, professionalism, what it means to be underweight, or what it means to be a wrestler, is identified.
- The researcher recognizes and specifies the broad philosophical assumptions of phenomenology.
- Data are collected from the individuals who have experienced the phenomenon.
- The participants are asked two broad, general questions (Moustakas, 1994): What have you experienced in terms of the phenomenon? What contexts or situations have typically influenced or affected your experiences of the phenomenon?
- Phenomenological data analysis
Horizonalization- significant statements taken from transcript to describe elements of experiencing phenomenon.
Significant Statement- sentences/quotes that describe how the participants experience phenomenon.
Similar significant statement- placed into “clusters of meanings” … different themes of the participant’s experience with the phenomena
Significant statements/clusters of meaning used to write…
- These significant statements and themes are then used to write a description of what the participants experienced (textural description)
They are also used to write a description of the context or setting that influenced how the participants experienced the phenomenon, called imaginative variation or structural description.
Case Study
Case study research is a qualitative approach in which the investigator explores a bounded system (a case) or multiple bounded systems (cases) over time, through detailed, in- depth data collection involving multiple sources of information (e.g., observations, interviews, audiovisual material, and documents and reports), and reports a case description and case-based themes.
Types of Case Studies
Three variations exist in terms of intent: the single instrumental case study, the collective or multiple case study, and the intrinsic case study.
Procedures
Several procedures are available for conducting case studies (see Merriam, 1998; Stake, 1995; Yin, 2003). This discussion will rely primarily on Stake’s (1995) approach to conducting a case study.
- First, researchers determine if a case study approach is appropriate to the research problem.
- Researchers next need to identify their case or cases.
- The data collection in case study research is typically extensive, drawing on multiple sources of information, such as observations, interviews, documents, and audiovisual materials.
- The type of analysis of these data can be a holistic analysis of the entire case or an embedded analysis of a specific aspect of the case (Yin, 2003).
- In the final interpretive phase, the researcher reports the meaning of the case, whether that meaning comes from learning about the issue of the case (an instrumental case) or learning about an unusual situation (an intrinsic case). As Lincoln and Guba (1985) mention, this phase constitutes the “lessons learned” from the case.
Challenges
One of the challenges inherent in qualitative case study development is that the researcher must identify his or her case.
The case study researcher must decide which bounded system to study, recognizing that several might be possible candidates for this selection and realizing that either the case itself or an issue, which a case or cases are selected to illustrate, is worthy of study.
The researcher must consider whether to study a single case or multiple cases.
Selecting the case requires that the researcher establish a rationale for his or her purposeful sampling strategy for selecting the case and for gathering information about the case.
. Deciding the “boundaries” of a case—how it might be constrained in terms of time, events, and processes—may be challenging.
