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Citations http://qix.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/13/4/471
Validity Issues
in Narrative Research
Qualitative Inquiry
Volume 13 Number 4
June 2007 471-486
2007 Sage Publications
10.1177/1077800406297670
http://qix.sagepub.com
hosted at
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Donald E. Polkinghorne
University of Southern California, Los Angeles
Attention to the judgments about the validity of research-generated knowledge claims is integral to all social science research. During the past several
decades, knowledge development has been split into two communities: conventional researchers and reformist researchers. Narrative research is positioned within the reformist community. The two communities use different
kinds of data and employ different analytic processes. In both communities,
researchers develop arguments to convince readers of the validity of their
knowledge claims. Both need to respond to threats to validity inherent in
their designs. The threats particular to narrative research relate to two areas:
the differences in peoples experienced meaning and the stories they tell
about this meaning and the connections between storied texts and the interpretations of those texts.
Keywords: interpretation; narrative; research; validity
arrative research is the study of stories. Stories are ubiquitous, appearing as historical accounts, as fictional novels, as fairy tales, as autobiographies, and other genres. Stories are also told by people about themselves
and about others as part of their everyday conversations. In addition to the
stories that appear in peoples ordinary conversations, narrative researchers
study stories they solicit from others: oral stories obtained through interviews and written stories through requests. The study of stories and the
storying process is undertaken by various academic disciplines including
literary criticism, history, philosophy, organizational theory, and social
science. Within social science, stories are studied by anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and educators. It is the purpose of this article to
inquire about the place of the study of stories in social science. In particular, my concern is the relation of the study of stories to the idea of validity.
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for its knowledge claims. I think this cross-community approach is unproductive and leads to a dead end because each community is making different kinds of knowledge claims. It is my position that different kinds of
knowledge claims require different kinds of evidence and argument to convince readers that the claim is valid. Nevertheless, there is general understanding of the concept of validation that is applicable, and perhaps
acceptable, to narrative researchers and conventional researchers. Both
communities are involved in validating their knowledge claims, and in a
general way their validating procedures parallel one another.
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all possible explanations other than the intervention that could account for
the measured results (internal validity; Campbell & Stanley, 1963). It also
makes claims that its findings apply not only to the participants who were
examined but also to all those in a comparable population. It uses randomized selection of participants and statistical procedures to convince readers
of the validity of these generalized claims.
It is not the purpose of this article to argue about the sufficiency of the
evidence and arguments used in conventional research to convince readers
of the validity of some of their knowledge claims. Whether or not readers
are convinced that a knowledge claim is justified is a function of their
assessment of the power of its supporting argument. Not being convinced
of the validity of a proposed knowledge claim occurs within both communities, and across communities. It is my position that what makes for a valid
knowledge claim is dependent on the kind of claim that is made. Thus, if
the claim is that an intervention causes changes in scores, then the claim is
valid if the evidence and argument presented convinces me that the claim is
justified. If the claim is that a persons story describes the anguish that the
person has experienced about a personal rejection, then I also look to the
supporting evidence and argument given by the researcher.
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defend the appropriateness of the meaning attributed to the words and phrases
of the text by providing the context in which they were made; or the
researcher can describe ways in which his or her own background experiences
produced understandings through interaction with the text.
Perelman (1982) also noted that arguments have four primary characteristics, (a) they proceed informally, not according to the forms and rules of
strict deduction and induction; (b) they are always addressed to audiences
for the purpose of inducing or increasing the audiences adherence to the
claim presented; (c) they nearly always involve ambiguity because their
language is inevitably equivocal in some degree and because the terms that
are available are often open to more than a single interpretation; and
(d) they seek a degree of acceptance of a claim, not a total and irrevocable
acceptance. Toulmin, in Uses of Argument (1958), provided another description of the general structures of a good argument. He says that the conclusion
needs to be grounded in evidence, the evidence in support of the conclusion
needs to be cited, the warrant connecting the evidence to the conclusion needs
to be spelled out, and support for this warrant needs to be given. These
characteristics and structures of argument provide useful approaches to the
construction of persuasive narrative research reports.
In addition to argumentation, Perelman (1982) described a second
rhetorical vehicle that is sometimes employed to justify conclusions. He
termed this second vehicle demonstration. He described demonstrations as
rhetorical processes grounded in the assumptions of formal logic and mathematical reasoning. In demonstrations it is adherence to the rules of calculation and logic that demonstrate the correctness of a conclusion. The
validity of a demonstrated conclusion is correct whether or not an audience judges it to be so. However, demonstrations depend on commitments
to certain axioms and principles whose appropriateness for developing
claims about the human condition is questionable (Polkinghorne, 1983). In
any case, the storied evidence of narrative research is not of a form susceptible to demonstrative rhetoric. The rhetoric used by narrative researchers
to convince readers of the validity of their claims is properly the type of
argumentation described by Perelman.
Narrative research, as well as conventional research, most often involves
two performances: (a) the collection of evidence and (b) the analysis or
interpretation of the evidence. Narrative researchers frequently move
between these two performances choosing further sources of evidence
based on needs derived from interpretations of the already gathered evidence. Narrative researchers need to argue for the acceptance of the validity of the collected evidence and the validity of the offered interpretation.
479
The storied descriptions people give about the meaning they attribute to
life events is, I believe, the best evidence available to researchers about the
realm of peoples experience. Nevertheless, they have limitations and
threats to their validity of which narrative researchers need to recognize in
making interpretations and in arguing for support of their knowledge
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The text is an artifact of the interviewers agenda and the tone of the
interviewers 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 interviewers body movements and voice intonations for
indications of whether their responses are acceptable.
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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 Shakespeares
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
Concluding Comments
Prior to the reformist movement, the social sciences primarily modeled
their approach to validation using conventionalist formulas. In this, they
believed that the only kind of social science knowledge claims that could
be sufficiently validated were those generated from numeric data and statistical analysis. The social science reformists, including narrative researchers,
held that social science needed to explore and develop knowledge about
areas of the human realm that fell outside the limits of what had conventionally been thought to be accessible to validation. These areas included
peoples experienced meanings of their life events and activities. Exploration
in these new areas required the development of new approaches for the validation of findings about these areas. The creation of these new approaches
required returning to the basic idea of validation that underlay the particular
validity producing rules and formats employed by conventional researchers.
This basic idea of validation placed the judgment of the worthiness of a
research knowledge claim in readers of the research. It is the readers who
make the judgment about the plausibility of a knowledge claim based on the
evidence and argument for the claim reported by the researcher. The confidence a reader grants to a narrative knowledge claim is a function of the
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