The subjective, contextual and situated nature of narrative, which is discussed above, is considered its main weakness by some scholars on the grounds that a narrative may not reflect the participant’s feelings and attitudes as they would be expressed outside the interview setting (Halford et al. 1997). However, this contextuality is accepted as the most important strength of narrative, by narrative researchers who are working from a social constructionist approach (Czarniawska 2004; Riessman 2002, 2008). For instance, Mishler (1986) argues that the variations and inconsistencies across interviews and between participants should not be seen as errors or technical problems, but data for analysis. Gabriel’s (2000) study of four different accounts about the same incident involving the explosion of a fire extinguisher well illustrates this argument. The incident happens in a workplace and four close witnesses are asked to tell how it occurred. In the first account, it was just an accident; in the second, a personal attack; in the third a test of character and in the fourth, a chance for retribution. Gabriel argues that here if the concern was to obtain the ‘truth’ regarding how the incident actually happened, these accounts would not have produced valid information on the question. However, if the research question is rather how these four people interpret this incident in relation to their different roles, responsibilities and conditions in the workplace, then the narrative provides credible evidence for the investigated topic. In a similar way, Elliott (2005, 26) notes that
A narrative will not capture a simple record of the past in the way that we hope that a video camera might. However, if the research focus is more on the meanings attached to individuals’ experiences and/or on the way that
those experiences are communicated to others then narratives provide an ideal medium for researching and understanding individuals’ lives in social context.
In a similar vein, during the interviews I encountered different narrations of one single incident, situation or argument. For example, three participants told stories regarding the design team of a large-scale company, which attracts many industrial designers due to the opportunities it offers. In all of them the main concern was it being a male-only design team for several years. According to the first participant, Deniz, the first woman industrial designer joined the design team after many years, there was a strong resistance in this team to women, especially by the senior designers. She indicated that in the job interview the two team leaders explicitly expressed their unwillingness to work with a woman designer, arguing that women do not work as hard as men, and recommended that she changes her mind regarding her application for that position. However, she says, finally they had to accept her into the team due to the good reference given by her previous manager. The second participant, who was a member of this male-only design team when Deniz was employed, told a different version of this story, stating that it was not intentional but just a coincidence that there were no women in the team until Deniz joined. From the viewpoint of the third participant, who heard about this issue from one of his colleagues, men in that team did not want to work with women because they believed that women were doing and saying things behind others’ back, so they were affecting the relationships negatively among the designers. However, he concluded, ironically it was men who caused problems in the team, and this was a silly prejudice.
In my interpretation of these stories, the first participant shows how she could overcome the resistance towards herself being a hardworking and successful industrial designer; the second one underlines that there were no discriminatory attitudes towards women in the design team; and the third one expresses his disapproval of such discriminatory behaviour in the workplace. Thus, participants shaped the stories in line with the concerns and evaluations they wished to communicate to me, as a successful woman who can overcome the barriers or an egalitarian man who does not approve of discriminatory behaviour.
A second issue regarding narrative research is that as a case-centred method it interrogates cases rather than population-based samples. As a result, it is difficult to generalise findings of a narrative study to the entire population. However, Flyvbjerg (2004) underlines that
statistical generalisation is not the only valid and desired outcome of research, and the rich, in-depth and context-dependent models of research are also essential to the development of new theories. Kvale and Brinkmann (2009, 261-62) support him suggesting a change to the question from “whether interview findings can be generalized globally” to “whether the knowledge produced in a specific interview situation may be transferred to other relevant situations.” Also, Riessman (2008, 13) argues against the assumption that the results of case- centred studies are not transferable, stressing that “making conceptual inferences about a social process (the construction of an identity group, for example, from close observation of one community) is an equally ‘valid’ kind of inquiry”. Thus, theoretical, if not statistical, generalisation is possible in narrative research.
So far, I have introduced and discussed the research method used. In the next two sections I will describe the research process including the access to the participants and selection and the production of narratives in the interviews.