Writing to Know: Exploring Methodological Choices in a Narrative Inquiry

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 1:45 pm - Gold 4
  In Roundtable Session: Analytical Approaches, Tools, and Creations for Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

This paper explores the methodological choice to center writing as an analytic tool throughout data generation, construction, and analysis. Using data from a 9-month ethnographic and narrative inquiry study, I explore and describe how I used “writing to know” to deepen understanding of both my data and my collaborators. This writing included memoing, annotating artifacts and narrative data, questioning, reflexive writing, emails to critical partners, email and text threads with my collaborators, and “writing through” my methodological choices. The array of strategies discussed in this paper underscores how the methodological tool of writing offers researchers one opportunity to demonstrate how we come to the representational choices we make throughout a research study.

Author

• Katharine Hull, University of South Florida