Rescuing narrative from qualitative research

Paul Atkinson and Sara Delamont

Cardiff School of Social Sciences

We review some of the recent trends that have made the collection and explo-
ration of narratives especially prominent among the social sciences. While we
acknowledge the significance of narratives in many aspects of social life, we
sound a note of caution concerning the popularity of ‘narratives’, and ‘testimony’,
not least among ‘qualitative’ researchers. We suggest that too many authors are
complicit in the general culture of ‘the interview society’, and are too ready to
celebrate narratives and biographical accounts, rather than subjecting them to
systematic analysis. In the same way, we suggest that the contemporary fashion
for ‘autoethnography’ too often leads to unreflective uses of personal accounts.
(Narrative, Qualitative Research, Autoethnography, Testimony)

The collection of narratives and other biographical or autobiographical texts has be-
come a central feature of qualitative research in many social sciences. Indeed, a close
inspection of many published papers and monographs, together with the burgeoning
methodological literature on qualitative research, shows that it is the in-depth inter-
view and the data that it yields that holds sway in many quarters. A great deal of what
passes for qualitative — and even ethnographic — research is grounded in the collec-
tion of personal narratives. Despite its considerable popularity, however, we believe
that the analysis of narratives needs to be ‘rescued’ from many applications in con-
temporary social research. This is intended to be a polemical formulation, designed
to highlight what we perceive to be a recurrent problem in much of the contemporary
literature.
This claim may seem paradoxical. There is absolutely no doubt as to the signifi-
cance of the ‘narrative turn’ in many of the disciplines and specialist fields of the social
sciences. Proponents and advocates of narrative-based inquiry have sometimes argued
that narratives provide analysts with particularly valuable insights into the organiza-
tion of personal experience: narrative seems to structure our understanding of events,

Requests for further information should be directed to Paul Atkinson, Cardiff School of Social
Sciences, Glamorgan Building, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3WT, UK. Email: Atkin-
sonPA@Cardiff.ac.uk

.  This contribution is adapted from sections of our Editorial Introduction to Narrative Meth-
ods, 4 Volumes, London, Sage, 2006.

Narrative Inquiry 16:1 (2006), 164–172.

issn 1387–6740 / e-issn 1569–9935 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
 Rescuing narrative from qualitative research 165

ourselves and other social actors. Narrative, memory and identity are all implicated
in narrative forms and content, and many social scientists have focused on narrative
work as a consequence. Our general approach is to stress the importance of narra-
tive and narrative analysis, but to resist the most extreme enthusiasms that have been
evident from among some of our academic colleagues. There need be no advocacy of
narrative work, nor need there be any ‘defence’ of narrative. Narratives are social phe-
nomena. They are among the many forms through which social life is enacted. They
do not, therefore, need endorsement any more than they deserve to be neglected. Our
stance towards such forms and genres of social life should be analytic, not celebratory.
While narratives are important forms of action and representation, we do not seek to
privilege them by claiming for them any unique or special qualities.
Our discussion starts from the premise that when social scientists collect nar-
ratives, whether life histories, biographies, myths, atrocity stories, jokes or whatever,
they need to focus on the social and cultural context in which such tales are told, and
to recognise that all cultures or sub-cultures have narrative conventions. ‘Traditional’
societies have multiple forms of narrative and oral performance, but the significance
of narratives is by no means confined to face-to-face cultures. The professional and
organizational cultures of complex ‘modern’ societies are replete with narrative forms
(e.g., Cortazzi, 1991; Delamont, 1991; Hunter, 1991; Mishler, 1997; Thomas, 1995).
The coming of the internet has also created a whole new ‘virtual’ world with its own
conventions and norms of narrative (Markham, 2004; Kendall, 1998).
The study of narratives is by no means confined simply to the narration itself.
Narratives are embedded in interactional and organizational contexts (Czarniawska,
2002). The telling and sharing of stories have important social functions. Narratives
have moral force, and may accomplish social status and professional authority. Story-
telling rights are as important as the collection of the stories themselves (Goodwin,
1990). There will be conventions about who can tell particular stories, who can listen
and respond, who can listen but must not respond, whether the narrative can be varied
or not, and whether it is, or is not legitimate to write things down (e.g., Frankenberg,
1993). Frankenberg contrasts his original Welsh village field site, where any written
record was ‘illegitimate’ (p. 55) with the Tuscan commune where literary texts were
celebrated as a community strength. In Heath’s (1983) ethnographic work on talk in
white working class homes in the Carolinas there was a restricted range of story-types
that women could tell. Likewise, the different communities Heath studied were char-
acterised by differentially distributed rights to tell stories. In one, the right to narrate
was clearly allocated to particular senior members, whereas in another such rights
were more evenly distributed and competitively exercised. Talk, including narrative
rights, is therefore performative of status and identity. In a quite different context,
Atkinson’s account of haematologists in an American teaching hospital shows how
professional seniority is partly enacted through differential rights to recount clinical
cases and professional experience (Atkinson, 1995).
From the perspective, then, of an analytic social science, there is ample opportuni-
ty and scope to examine the forms and functions of narrative in a wide variety of natu-
rally occurring settings, as well as collecting them specifically for research purposes, in
166 Paul Atkinson and Sara Delamont

the interview encounter. On the other hand, we are not convinced that these analytic
opportunities are always identified or exploited to the full. All too often, we believe,
narratives are collected and celebrated in an uncritical and unanalysed fashion. It is a
common failing, for instance, to imply that informants’ voices ‘speak for themselves’, or
that personal, biographical materials provide privileged means of access to informants’
personal experiences, or their sources of self-identity.
In contrast to these essentially sociological or anthropological perspectives, the
unreflective and uncritical use of narratives is complicit in the forms of social life that
the social scientist ought to be investigating. Our own attitude is captured by Behar,
who asks rhetorically: ‘At a moment when the autobiographical voice is so highly com-
modified — most visibly in the talk shows… shouldn’t scholars write against the grain
of this personalising of culture rather than reproduce it?’ (Behar, 1996, p.25). As Atkin-
son and Silverman (1997) and Gubrium and Holstein (2002) have pointed out, many
of us in the West inhabit an ‘interview society’, in which celebrity is created through
the mass distribution of confessions, and through which ordinary people can have
their personal problems and experiences transformed into public (albeit ephemeral)
goods. The interview and the personal revelation are among the devices that produce
Warhol’s proverbial fifteen minutes of fame. There is a clear danger that the narrative
turn in the cultural and social sciences merely mirrors this phenomenon, rather than
scrutinising its workings (Atkinson & Silverman, 1997).
Atkinson (1997) also argued that the popularity of narrative data and narrative
analysis is a mixed blessing. Atkinson in particular warned against the use of narra-
tives in a ‘recuperative’ role: giving voice to otherwise muted groups. This perspective
is highly sceptical regarding implicit claims that in-depth interviews or collected nar-
ratives are a route into an interior authentic self. In a discussion focused specifically on
illness narratives Atkinson suggested that too many narrative analyses lack a thorough-
going sense of social action and organization, so that ‘The narratives seem to float in a
social vacuum. The voices echo in an otherwise empty world. There is an extraordinary
absence of social context, social action, and social interaction’ (Atkinson 1997, p. 339).
In contrast, it is argued that researchers must apply the same canons of methodological
scepticism to illness narratives as to any other social acts and cultural forms. Autobio-
graphical accounts are no more ‘authentic’ than other modes of representation: a narra-
tive of a personal experience is not a clear route into ‘the truth’, either about the reported
events, or of the teller’s private experience. It is one of the key lessons of narrative analy-
sis that ‘experience’ is constructed through the various forms of narrative. This is one of
the most important messages conveyed by Plummer’s analysis of narratives concerned
with a number of sexually-related experiences, including accounts of ‘coming out’ as
gay, and the stories of rape victims (Plummer, 1995). He shows that while such stories
— and the events they refer to — are intensely personal, they are thoroughly shaped by
cultural conventions. They conform to conventions of genre, in other words.
It is, therefore, clear that social scientists need to treat narratives as ‘accounts’ and
as ‘performances’. The analysis of personal narratives as accounts owes much to the
inspiration of Lyman and Scott (1968), and to subsequent authors who stress the char-
acter of narratives as kinds of speech acts, or as incorporating speech acts. In other
 Rescuing narrative from qualitative research 167

words, narratives are analysed in terms of their rhetorical, persuasive properties, and
their functions in constructing particular versions of events, justifications of actions,
evaluations of others, and so on. One of the classic empirical examples of work in this
vein is the analysis of scientists’ talk by Gilbert and Mulkay (1984). They examined the
results of interviewing natural scientists about the process of scientific discovery. They
demonstrate how scientists employ different registers or accounting devices, in order to
provide, and implicitly to reconcile, contrasting versions of how science gets done. Sci-
entists’ accounts included explanations of scientific discovery couched in terms of the
inexorable revelation of truth through scientific method and explanations in terms of
serendipity and personal circumstances (see also Atkinson, Batchelor & Parsons, 1997,
for a similar analysis of genetic scientists’ talk). In other words, such accounts are not
treated ‘at face value’, as if they revealed a consistent and coherent representation of a
reality that is independent of the accounts themselves. Rather, the narratives, and the
accounting devices they enshrine, create the realities they purport to describe. With
data drawn from social circumstances very different from the world of science, Riess-
man’s analysis of divorce talk shows that women and men can construct quite different
realities of their relationship through contrasting narrative accounts (Riessman, 1990).
As Atkinson and Coffey (2002) point out, the research interview should be examined
analytically as a performative act, through which identities are enacted, actions are jus-
tified and recounted events are retrospectively constructed. This overall perspective
owes much to the pioneering observations of C. Wright Mills (1940), whose discussion
of ‘vocabularies of motive’ was a prescient analysis of how motivational accounts should
be analysed as speech acts, invoking justificatory frames of reference, rather than as
transparent indices of actual predispositions. This is a perspective also carried through
in ethnomethodological analyses (Baker 2002) and in discursive psychology (Hepburn
& Potter, 2004).
We can identify a convergence between the ‘narrative turn’ in the social sciences
and a ‘performative turn’ (Doyle 1998). Researchers have always been interested in
performance in ‘other’ cultures: anthropologists’ accounts of performances were high
points of many monographs (e.g., Cowan 1990). One of the most famous anthropologi-
cal analyses ever written, Geertz’s (1973) of the Balinese cock-fight would fall into this
category. Gary Marvin’s (1988) and Sara Pink’s (1997, 1998) ethnographies of Spanish
bull-fighting are more recent examples. Sociology has also been interested in some kinds
of performances, but had, until relatively recently been relatively neglectful towards
high culture performances of ballet, opera and serious literature (Atkinson, 2006). In
recent years, however, the idea of performance has become widened, to a generic in-
terest in ‘performativity’ (e.g., Butler, 1997; Denzin, 2003; Tulloch, 1999). The analytic
notion of ‘performance’ may, conceptually speaking, be extended beyond its traditional
meanings, to encompass a wide range of actions, representations and displays. It needs
to be recognized that narratives are performative, and performances are often couched
in narrative terms. Narratives have their ethnopoetic features, and the most mundane
of stories have aesthetic and dramatic features (Tedlock, 1983; Richardson, 2002).
Performative acts, including narratives, life-histories and personal testimony have
been celebrated and advocated as acts of cultural resistance on the part of the marginal,
168 Paul Atkinson and Sara Delamont

the dispossessed and the muted. The influence of women’s studies, black studies, gay
and lesbian studies, and other movements to provide intellectual space in academic
disciplines for those previously regarded as the objects of study or as an ignored sub-
altern class or a deviance object for social control, has also led to a growth of narra-
tives. Performative acts are seen as a potent cultural form of anti-colonialism (Denzin,
2003). Testimonios are particularly an example of this: Behar (1996, p. 27) writes that
the testimonio ‘speaks to the role of witnessing in our time as a key form of approach-
ing and transforming reality’. She locates its origins in the therapeutic: initially helping
Holocaust survivors face up to their trauma, and subsequently with Latin American
and Central American victims of political repression. Anzaldúa and Moraga’s (1981)
This bridge called my back, in which minority women provided their own narratives
without the normally explicit intervention and translation by anthropologists, led to a
rapid growth in the publication of such pieces. The most famous testimonio, Burgos-
Debray’s (1984) I, Rigoberta Menchù: An Indian woman in Guatemala, is both a tool
for consciousness raising and a symbol, for conservative American educational writ-
ers, of all that has gone wrong with scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.
Scheurich and Foley (2000) summarise the production of this work of personal
testimony and its aftermath. They remind us that Rigoberta Menchù was a Guate-
malan woman involved in Central American people’ resistance against the US gov-
ernment and corporations and the indigenous political and military elites. Elisabeth
Burgos-Derby, a Venezuelan anthropologist recorded Rigoberta Menchù’s story over a
twelve-day period in Paris. The recordings were translated into English and the book
sold 150,000 copies, became famous, and Rigoberta Menchù was awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize. Then David Stoll, whom Scheurich and Foley describe as ‘a largely un-
known U.S. ethnographer trying to disparage the left in Central America’, discovered
discrepancies in the testimonio and published a book accusing Menchù of falsehood
(Stoll, 1999). At this point a fully-fledged intellectual controversy broke out in the
United States. As Scheurich and Foley (2000, p. 102) point out, this intellectual row
‘displaces the deadly horror of what has been done’ in Central America. Lather (2000)
addresses how Rigoberta Menchù’s work is to be read, in a special issue of International
Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (QSE) devoted to the debates over the Nobel
Peace Prize Menchù won. In 2003 QSE subsequently devoted another special issue
to Rigoberta Menchù and testimonies. This is but the best known, and most contro-
versial, of the many uses of life-history and narrative to give voice to the silenced, in
explicitly political ways. Here the narrative turn overlaps with a critical desire to create
multi-vocality in the reporting of research: so that the lives and voices of the people
are made available to a wide audience rather than being assimilated to the discourse of
hegemonic academic texts.
It is clear, however, that, given what we have had to say in foregoing sections we
would wish to commend a degree of caution and methodological scepticism. Our
concern would not be whether a given testimonio is internally consistent or entirely
accurate. Since we do not believe that any account simply mirrors some antecedent re-
ality, but helps to create that very reality itself, we also believe that such performances
cannot be held to give privileged access to a political ‘truth’. As social scientists, we
 Rescuing narrative from qualitative research 169

believe that we must sustain a commitment to an analytic stance, and not a celebra-
tory one. We need, therefore, to retain a degree of distance from the narrative materi-
als we collect, analyse and reproduce. In our view, the political engagement of some
authors should not become an excuse for the uncritical celebration of particular kinds
and sources of social acts, nor for the abandonment of obligations to treat them as
social ‘facts’ susceptible to sustained analytic inspection. As we have argued elsewhere,
such an analytic stance reconfigures the hoary methodological question: ‘How do you
know if your informant is telling the truth?’ In its original formulation in sociological
research methods, this problem was posed in relation to research interviewing (see At-
kinson, Coffey & Delamont, 2003). It is couched primarily in terms of the reliability of
data collected by such means. From our perspective, however, ‘truth’ is not a property
to be treated as an issue in the quality-control of information. On the contrary, verac-
ity and verisimilitude are to be inspected as embedded in the rhetorical properties and
discursive structures of narrative accounts themselves (Atkinson & Coffey, 2002).
It should be clear, therefore, from these brief comments and examples that we urge
‘qualitative’ researchers to treat narratives and spoken performances very seriously.
Our stance is in no way oppositional to the collection and use of narrative materials
as resources for social analysis. We do, however, believe that ‘treating them seriously’
involves the recognition that they are forms of social action, like any other. Moreover,
they are inescapably social phenomena. That means more than acknowledging that
they are produced and circulated in ‘social contexts’. It also implies the recognition that
they are based on socially shared conventions. As Plummer’s work, referred to above,
makes abundantly clear, even the most superficially ‘private’ experiences are enacted in
accordance with culturally prescribed genres and formats of expression. The ‘confes-
sion’ is as much a ritual performance as is the proverbial Balinese cock-fight.
From a sociological or anthropological perspective, therefore, the very categories
of the ‘personal’ and of ‘experience’ need to be disassembled and subjected to analytic
scrutiny. This is especially urgent at a time when social scientists are increasingly gen-
erating their own narratives of experience under the rubric of autoethnography. There
is a long tradition of ethnographers in sociology and anthropology writing personal ac-
counts of their own fieldwork (cf. Van Maanen, 1988; Coffey, 1999; Atkinson, 1996). In
recent years, however, the narrative turn and the renewed emphasis on autobiographi-
cal narrative have given a new urgency to the genre. The amount of research attention
given to narrative has varied between different disciplines for over a century, and has
also changed within disciplines over that period. In anthropology, Behar (1996, pp. 26–
27) states that there has been ‘a re-theorization of genres like the life history and the life
story and the creations of hybrid genres life self-ethnography and ethno-biography….
The genres of life history and life story are merging with the testimonio, which speaks
to the role of witnessing in our time as a key form of approaching and transforming
reality.’ There is, therefore, a convergence in the intellectual commitments of narrative
and life-history research and the reflexive representation of the ethnographer (Davies,
1999). The ethnographer is simultaneously narrator and narrated in her or his textual
representations. This translation of what might once have been seen as a relatively mar-
ginal activity — the fieldwork confessional — into a central activity by anthropologists
170 Paul Atkinson and Sara Delamont

and others, is a welcome development in one way. One cannot but applaud the desire
to foreground the personal craft work of fashioning field research and ethnographic
texts (cf Atkinson, 1990). But, as with all narratives, such accounts must be treated with
analytic symmetry. We cannot proceed as if they were privileged accounts, or as if they
gave the writer and the reader access to the private domain of personal experience. The
autobiographical narratives of ethnographers are subject to the same cultural conven-
tions as are any other of the social actions and performances that they might document
(Atkinson, 1996).
To conclude, therefore, while we are thoroughly appreciate of the ethnographic or
qualitative turn in the social sciences, and of the collection of narrative materials in
that context, we counsel a degree of caution, and a greater emphasis on analytic rigour.
When it comes to personal narratives, spoken performances, oral testimony and au-
toethnographies, we should not simply collect them as if they were untrammelled,
unmediated representations of social realities. While the development and spread of
qualitative social science are to be welcomed, too many of its manifestations result
in slack social science, born of an adherence to the evocation of ‘experience’, as op-
posed to the systematic analysis of social action and cultural forms. It is, we suggest,
a vital corrective that narrative should be viewed as a form of social action, with its
indigenous, socially shared, forms of organization. Narratives should be analyzed as
a social phenomenon, not as the vehicle for personal or private experience. Equally,
we counsel caution when it comes to attributing to narratives or narrative analysis an
especially moral quality. While the ‘voices’ of otherwise muted groups may be charged
with political significance, we cannot proceed as if they were guaranteed authenticity
simply by virtue of narrators’ social positions. The testimony of the powerless and the
testimony of the powerful equally deserve close analytic attention. Moral commitment
is not a substitute for social-scientific analysis.

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