316 ANALYZING DATA
316CHAPTER 18
STORIES FOR RESEARCH
STEVEN MAYNARD-MOODY AND MICHAEL MUSHENO
SM-M: In the late 1970s, when I was a grad student, debates on the competing virtues and sins of
quantitative and qualitative research filled doctoral seminars. At that moment, not long after the
behavioral revolution but just before the formal theory coup, new ideas about methods and knowl-
edge were explored and argued over. I instinctively recoil from either/or choices and have always
been attracted to both qualitative and quantitative research. As a researcher I’m most content in
the field talking to “locals” or reading, once again, interview transcripts. But I can get lost for
weeks trying to discern meaning from those unbending numbers in a data set. I have long been
struck by a dilemma: I have much greater confidence in the insights and generalizability of my
more qualitative research, while it is easier to convince others that statistically reported findings
have greater explanatory power.
My interest in stories grew out of my restlessness with standard interview and fieldwork practice.
In the early 1990s, discussions of narrative and meaning spread across many disciplines. To learn
more, I assigned a doctoral seminar some reading on the epistemology of narrative and sent the
students out in the field to collect stories about public managers’ relationships to elected officials.
Coauthor Michael Musheno and my long-standing interest in implementation theory and street-
level bureaucracy, plus Michael’s interest in identity questions, combined with stories to form the
research described in the chapter here, which, as the chapter notes, changed our views of all
three subjects. Michael and I had collaborated on a study of community corrections in the mid-
1980s and were looking for a way to work together again. We decided to try to “think big” and,
on the second attempt, received funding from the National Science Foundation for our two-state,
multisite field research project. A few lines from the acknowledgments of our book best capture
our experience of exploration and discovery, which is discussed in the chapter that follows.The place was different but the moment was the same: for Michael it occurred in a police
patrol car; for Steven it was in the meeting room of a vocational rehabilitation office. The
moment was when each of us collected our first story, and we knew we were hearing and,
in our mind’s eye, seeing governing at the front-lines. We were entering the world of
street-level work; a world of tensions, ambiguity, and difficult, often painful, choices and
judgments. At these moments we were not sure what these first stories, and the many
stories that followed, would tell us or if they would fit into a larger narrative.... But,
with so much yet to do, we felt it all coming together; we felt we were on to something
although at that time we had only the faintest clues what that something was. This
research project has been a wondrous intellectual adventure....
—Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2003, xi–xii)