Although ethnographic and in-depth interview methods could be a good match for my research interest, as both allow for a qualitative and focused study of individuals and the uncovering of their institutional and discursive positions, I argue that the ‘best match’ is provided by the methodological orientations and approaches of narrative research or life history research. This form of research is based on linguistic expressions of a life narrative most commonly generated in interview situations where the interviewee is asked to share either specific sections of their life or the narrative of their whole life (Miller, 2000: 2). This produces qualitative and in-depth study of the person’s subjective understanding of the ‘essence’ of their life (Atkinson, 2002: 123). This approach is particularly useful for the study of individual constructions of identity, learning experiences, life course progression, amidst
various aspects of broader social change or social context: ‘a storied narrative is the linguistic form that preserves the complexity of human action with its interrelationship of temporal sequence, human motivation, chance happenings, and changing interpersonal and environmental context’ (Polkinghorne, 1995: 7).
As with all qualitative methods, it is characterised by flexibility in its design and continual redesign of the method; it often involves simultaneous or cyclical data collection and analysis (Burgess, 1985: 7-8). This method also implies that the researcher’s autobiography may be a source of research orientation, and it will certainly impact on the analysis of data through ongoing reflection (Roberts, 2002: 13). Like other qualitative methods, for example those based on other kinds of interviewing, using key informants or observation and ethnography, the life history methodology is well suited for researching incidents, experiences as well as norms and practices, or simply meanings that are attached to events by their participants (Roberts, 2002: 3). Moreover, it is obviously a methodology specially relevant and efficient for studying individual histories in context (Burgess, 1985: 3), in this case, in the educational contexts of curricular, institutional or societal change. One specific feature of biographical or narrative research is that there is no clear-cut testable hypothesis to start with - the direction of the study emerges out of a dialogical engagement between the storytellers, the underpinning theories and the researcher’s changing interpretations of them (Lieblich, 1998: 10).
This methodology is increasingly employed in social science and humanities research, and at their intersection (Blumenfeld-Jones, 1995); oral history, biography, life history, narrative
analysis, reminiscence, and life review are just some of the specific methods that share ‘a focus on the recording and interpretation by some means or other of the life experience of individuals’ (Bornat, 2003: 35) The origins of the method are variously attributed to developments within historiography and the oral history tradition, to early sociological studies of emigrant lives, to comparative linguistics, literary theory, psychology (Freud and Human development studies), counselling, folklore studies and anthropology (Atkinson, 2002; Miller, 2000; Czarniawska, 2004; Bornat, 2003; Rosenthal, 2003; Roberts, 2002)
In humanities, broadly defined, it is the underlying focus on the story as a representation of narrative cognition which underlies the validity and popularity of narrative methods. According to many authors, narrative knowledge is a way of knowing which is as valuable in understanding human action and events as the logical-scientific form of cognition more often used in social-science research. The human capacity for narrative cognition based on plot structures and specific human experience of time (Ricoeur, 1983: 52). The culturally widespread need to represent life and experiences in the form of a story (whether fictional or historical or personal) accounts for the appeal of the methodology to many researchers (Atkinson, 2002; Shacklock and Thorp, 2005; Cortazzi, 1993). This sort of research often focuses on the most widespread story-telling components and the specific formal structures or elements of the narrative itself.
History may be credited with the development of oral history as a new and interdisciplinary approach to studying recent and social history, and as part of the twentieth century methodological proliferation of ways to research and reconstruct various histories, particularly
social history, women’s history, and global history. This method aims to help illuminate historical change and specific events or specific group’s experiences through a focus on the meaning - making process and on the individual as a witness to their community and its transformations. Hobsbawm argues that much methodological sophistication is still missing from this form of grassroots history because of historians’ lack of knowledge of the problems of human memory and because the historical source has to be produced for the specific research question rather than discovered (Hobsbawm, 1997). Therefore, in history this method would often be used in conjunction with other available documents in order to recreate a specific perspective on an event or era without relying exclusively on the reminiscence of particular individuals. Still, some excellent examples of the approach, dealing largely with twentieth century phenomena, do manage to engage deeply with the intersections of subjectivity and social structure by relying on stories as primary data for analysis. These studies often reproduce cultural collective representations of a class or a social context as part of individual storytelling through use of symbols, myths, humour or religious concepts (Portelli, 1997; Passerini, 1987).
In sociology, to some extent because of the influence of oral history, and to some extent through revisiting early research using single case studies of individual lives, the life story is often seen a mere background or illustration for the study of social transformation, but there has also been a proliferation of narrative, biographical or autobiographical methods in the discipline (Rosenthal, 2003) which have more complex intentions, focusing on key questions of identity (such as gender, class or other social grouping) and on social change. These methods rely on the ability of the researcher to exercise ‘sociological imagination’ (Mills
1959), in linking the individual’s biography to larger accounts of social processes and theoretical concepts of social structure.
The narrative tradition has made significant contribution to the study of individuals in educational settings, and educational research is credited with being at the forefront of this methodological development (Roberts, 2002: 23). Women educators have employed autobiographical accounts, particularly in feminist research in education (e.g. David, 2002; Deem, 1996). Some of the researchers using this approach have focused on the deeply conflicting or non-unitary’ stories of the self in education (Bloom and Munro, 1995). The stories of professional development and of the working lives of teachers and educators have also been suggested as the starting point to a more collaborative inquiry into the practices of teaching, with attention to the practitioner’s ‘voice’, their professionalism, and their centrality in ‘delivering’ education (Goodson, 1991). In general, educationally motivated life history research focuses on the need to connect the private and professional life of teachers and to engage with the perspectives of teachers as otherwise excluded agents of policy debates (Goodson and Sikes, 2001). Some research on teaching and learning experiences has also taken the narrative approach (Cortazzi, 1993), which is seen as particularly promising in combination with international or comparative perspectives or research foci (Trahar, 2006). In this specific context, this new focus is justified by the need of international and comparative education to overcome national boundaries and cultural divisions by listening to voices across borders (Fox, 2006: 48), and it is hoped that these international voices, generated though narrative research may ‘drive comparative and international research to assist educators in using dialogue to explore hegemony and create opportunities for change’ (Trahar, 2006: 15).
Narrative inquiry has its own criteria of validity that distinguish it from some other qualitative methods and from all quantitative or computational methods. Among such criteria, persuasiveness, adequacy, accessibility, trustworthiness coherence, explanatory power have been proposed (Hatch and Wisniewski, 1995). This need for different criteria of validity largely comes out of the acknowledgement that this research format is unashamedly subjectively constructed by both informants and the researcher (Goodson and Sikes, 2001; Denzin, 1989).
In this type of research, in-depth understanding of particular human action or experience is sought as a means of illuminating the particular case or set of cases with their similarities and differences, but it does not aim to predict or explain actions or the totality of events: ‘the cumulative effect of narrative reasoning is a collection of cases where thought moves from case to case instead of from case to generalisation’ (Polkinghorne, 1995: 11). The key criteria of narrative analysis include fidelity of subsequent analytical explanations to the original story, and believability of the analysis, that is the extent to which the meanings or narratives produced by the researcher resonate with the experiences of the story teller:
First, the narrative inquirer must maintain fidelity both towards the story of a person (and what the person makes of his or her story) and towards what the person may not be able to articulate about the story and its meanings (the context in which the story exists). Second, what the original teller makes of his or her own story is bounded by her or his purposes in telling the story. This reminds us that even the original teller is also reconstructing the narrative. To make the situation still more complex, the narrative inquirer must remember that he or she has
intentions and is reconstructing as well. Narrative inquiry is an artificial endeavour existing within layers of intention and reconstruction. (Blumenfeld-Jones, 1995: 28)
Another criterion for evaluating this sort of research may also be the degree of explanatory fit, or plausibility, or persuasiveness of the analysis of the stories produced by the researcher. The explanatory fit emerges as a result of rigorous and repeated movement between the narrative data and emerging interpretations. The movement is meant to ensure that the final story is truly exhaustive and saturated by the data available, either from the interview transcript itself, or from additional interviews and other documents (Polkinghorne, 1995: 13; Rosenthal, 2003: 55-57). Ultimately, Roberts claims that ‘the vital issue could be the quality of the theoretical reasoning rather than questions of representativeness’, and these need to match the goals of the research project, which could be the generation or validation of a theory, gaining new conceptual insights or illustrating existing theories (Roberts, 2002: 12).
My research does not attempt to create a breath of coverage across a specific population or cohort or generation. Nor is it concerned with understanding the diversity of views of representatives of one particular institution or context. Instead of generalisability, we may hopefully talk about comparativity across similar cases, and ‘translatability’ understood as fit of the research design for its purpose (Schoefield, 2007: 187). The purpose of this approach is to gain sociological depth in the analysis of the experiences and effects of the emerging, internationalised academic identity and practice, but not leading to generalisations about an entire university system. The nature of my research is largely exploratory or critical and aimed at creating new conceptual insights for which this research approach seems fitting:
The appeal of biographical research is that it is exploring, in diverse methodological and interpretive ways, how individual accounts of life experience can be understood within the contemporary cultural and structural settings and is thereby helping to chart major social changes that are underway, but not merely at some broad social level (Roberts, 2002: 5)