The Consideration of Truth and Fact in Narrative Analysis

• In Event: 43.056 - Critical Narrative Perspectives

Abstract

Narrative inquirers insist that study participants are experts on their own lives and the meanings they convey are prioritized in our scholarship. But this deference to a participant’s interpretation of their experiences is not intended as a methodological means to determine “fact,” a term indicating a knowable reality verifiable by empirical evidence. (Hodkinson & Smith, 2005) The purpose of this paper is to brood on the dynamic tensions that arise when the narrative imperative to seek the meaning of events as told by those who lived them (truth) bumps against the empirical imperative inquiry (facts).

Author

• Jeananne Nichols, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign