STORIES FOR RESEARCH 321That said, our working definition of “stories” is close to the everyday use of the term. Stories
in our research have plot lines, however simple or tenuous. They have a beginning, which
could be nothing more than an arbitrary opening—“Let me tell you a story about.. .”—or
which could concern a specific initiating event—“A few years ago this guy walked into my
office... .” Stories have a middle, which may include one or more digressions, and an end,
which brings events to their logical or surprising conclusion. The conclusion may resolve the
dilemmas or issues raised in the story, but some stories end with the main issues unsettled; they
just stop. Our specific working definition of stories and our procedure for story collection are
described later in this chapter.
The in-depth interview that is oriented toward identifying, locating, ascertaining, and describ-
ing facts, events, and observations remains an essential tool for accessing and generating data in
qualitative and interpretive research, but stories offer several important advantages over this more
standard method. Storytelling occurs naturally in any social setting. Hayden White comments,
“To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture
and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so
inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happen, that narrativity
could appear problematic only in a culture in which it was absent” (1980, 1). Interviews are
always an artifact of the research process, whereas storytelling and stories exist outside the re-
search project. They are told in social settings when the researcher is absent; unlike interviews,
stories have a “life” of their own.
Because of this, perhaps the ideal method of story collection would be for the researcher to
become a “participant-listener,” recording stories as they are naturally, and inevitably, told in
social settings. The participant-listener could record the responses of other listeners as well as
aspects of setting and context. One drawback to this strategy is that it can be prohibitively time
consuming and inefficient. The challenge for a social scientist with a limited amount of time to
spend in the field is, therefore, to develop a research protocol that solicits “naturally occurring”
stories, rather than waiting for ones that come along or that are invented just for the researcher.
Without “participant-listening,” we cannot be certain that stories told to researchers are similar to
those told in the natural setting, but William Labov, a linguist, suggests that stories told to re-
searchers will correspond to stories told to insiders. He observes that in retelling stories, storytell-
ers do not monitor and censor their own speech to the extent common in face-to-face interviews.
Storytelling can become so engaging that the teller may say more than he or she consciously
knows. As Labov writes:
The most effective of these techniques produces narratives of personal experience, in
which the speaker becomes deeply involved in rehearsing or even reliving events of his
past.... Because [these narratives] occur in response to a specific stimulus in the inter-
view situation, they are not free of the interactive effect of the outside observer. The form
they take is in fact typical of discourse directed to someone outside of the immediate peer
group of the speaker. But because the experience and emotions involved here form an
important part of the speaker’s biography, he seems to undergo a partial reliving of that
experience and he is no longer free to monitor his own speech as he normally does in
face-to-face interviews. (1972, 354–55)STORIES FOR RESEARCH
Selecting Storytellers. Telling and hearing stories are central to the construction and maintenance
of social groups from friendships to nations, underscoring their potential as subjects for interpre-