Narrative Inquiry: Critical Event Approach

We use narrative inquiry to understand human existence through personal stories. Hearing multiple people narrate living similar experiences, stories that talk to and against one another, sometimes highlights contradictory understandings of any given topic and always underscores the varied complexities of lived experiences. We use raw narratives, the interviewees' words reflected as accurately as when they interacted in the interviews, so that readers can draw their own conclusions before seeing others' (and our own) interpretations. As opposed to providing a basis for generalizing or affording a standard account of an experience, raw narratives highlight distinctive features and details that may be overlooked or undervalued as the researcher attempts to represent the experiences of others.

In addition to the previous narrative inquiry components, we underscore critical events, which produce stories and emotions that are unplanned, unanticipated, and uncontrolled (Webster & Mertova, 2007). Critical events could be spoken or unspoken parts of the interview. We believe critical events both literally and figuratively emphasize the essential parts of the story and frame what we should write and how we should write it. These critical events guide us to “think with the story” (Ellis & Bochner, 2000, p. 747) and to consider our connection to the speaker and the story, so that we can determine what we can learn from either the speaker or the story itself. The representation of the story, as shown in the following example, is then a specific set of questions leading to a meaningful silence that ultimately illustrate a critical event.

Mitchell's chapter in Voice in Qualitative Inquiry: Challenging Conventional, Interpretive, and Critical Conceptions in Qualitative Research (2008) considers the assertion that the more familiar researchers are with the communities (academic, political, familial, and so forth) to which their participants belong, the better positioned researchers are to understand the stories that their participants tell. In one particularly telling instance, an African American female mathematics professor stated that issues associated with race and gender had absolutely nothing to do with her subject matter, hence issues associated with race and gender would not be discussed in her class. However, when asked if her own racial and gendered identity influenced her professional advancement or the ways that her students related to her, she commented, “Absolutely, and if you turn that tape recorder off then we can talk” (p. 77).

Lacking familiarity with conversations about African American professors' experiences of teaching in majority European American schools, and given the scarcity of women who have historically participated in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics areas, a researcher could be confused about the participant's unwillingness to be recorded when discussing the ways that her being African American and female influence her teaching experiences. However, recognizing her reasons for not discussing issues associated with race and gender in this context represents a critical event through which Mitchell was given insight into the nature of his participant's tenuous relationship to both the institution at which she is employed and the subject matter that she is teaching. Narrative reflection provides a valuable perspective from which to recognize this critical moment that brings together the collective experience of a historically marginalized community (black female academics in this case) in a specific academic discipline (mathematics) and in a specific university classroom (at a majority white institution) through the stories of an individual. To overlook this silence that we are referring to as a critical event risks overlooking the professor's perception of both her discipline and the institution at which she taught. In this regard it is not simply the story that is told that illuminates her experience but also the meaning that it holds for her and the researcher that make her silence the linchpin for conceptualizing this critical moment.