320 ANALYZING DATA
trol are the prominent themes of the State-Agent Narrative and are understood within the context
of structure and authority. The State-Agent Narrative focuses on how democratic theory accom-
modates to the presence of administration and hierarchy in the modern state.
After three years of fieldwork, story collection, and interpretive engagement, we learned, as
suggested in the prefacing quotes, that street-level workers did not define their work in relation to
policy makers, policy, laws, or rules. Discretion and accountability were nearly absent from street-
level narratives, in contrast to more widely present issues of identity and moral judgment. Based
on the dominant themes in the existing literature and the related expectations we took into the
field, we were initially startled, but the more closely we listened to the street-level workers, the
more audible an alternative narrative became. Before we examine this counter-narrative, the one
we have called the Citizen-Agent Narrative, we locate our mode of narrative inquiry as “story
based” and identify key choices we made in collecting and analyzing stories, revealing the inter-
pretive framing of our method of inquiry. This pedagogy, although rich with choices, is also
constituted by the demands, some might say the constraints, of scholarly inquiry.A PEDAGOGY OF STORY-BASED RESEARCHStorytelling is an act of “world-building” and “world-populating” (L. Polanyi 1985). On hear-
ing a story we enter, if only for a moment, this created world and interact with its invented
characters. Storytellers recreate their world as they see it and as they want to present it to
others. These recreations are not photographically accurate accounts of events and people.
Researchers cannot separate the storytellers’ interpretations and their decisions regarding what
to present and how to present the story from the events recounted (or invented) and the charac-
ters described (or imagined). Stories are not facts or evidence waiting for interpretation; they
are, from the moment they are conceived through their many tellings and retellings, the em-
bodiment of the storytellers’ interpretations.
The process of interpretation in story-based research begins with the task of ascertaining the
storytellers’ interpretations that form the story text, whether spoken or written. Stories are told
deliberately to communicate meaning and points of view. Our interpretations began by seeking to
understand what the storyteller was trying to say through the inclusion of certain details, the
choice of words and phrases, the sequencing of events, and the use of storytelling techniques,
such as repetition. Hearing, transcribing, reading, and rereading stories is not standard social
research practice, even among intensive field-based researchers who traditionally rely on direct
observation, in-depth interviews, and documents. Nevertheless, if the root question is not “how
much” or “how many,” but rather “how do” people—in our research, street-level workers—
comprehend their own experiences, then stories provide a powerful and revealing research instru-
ment. “Storytelling and understanding are functionally the same thing,” Roger Schank (1990, 24)
reminds us.^3 To understand a story is to understand the storyteller.STORIES AND OTHER TEXTSThe various textual forms of interpretive and qualitative social science, such as historical ac-
counts, ethnographic field notes, in-depth interview transcripts, and observational reports, are
forms of narratives. They describe events and exist within a historical moment. No clear line
separates these narrative forms from stories. Often, a person being interviewed makes a point by
telling a story, and storytellers often punctuate their narration with asides of commentary that are
indistinguishable in form and content from interview responses.