Interpretation and Method Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn

330 ANALYZING DATA

interpretations grounded in people’s understandings of their own contexts. Though distilled by

the storyteller, stories retain much of the ambiguity, contradictions, and complexity of social life.

Although not factual in the narrow, positivist sense of the word, these texts have an evidentiary

status of their own: They can be read, reread, shared, and argued over. Although there may be no

definitive interpretations, story texts allow us to base our interpretations on the interpretations of

others—in our case, street-level workers—and, as important, these texts allow us to demonstrate

to others the bases for our insights.

Collaboration among the research team proved essential to our discovery process. We oper-

ated on the simple rule that our individual observations, interpretations, and counterarguments

must be based on the story texts. As we developed, challenged, and reconsidered our interpreta-

tions, we forced each other to listen ever more closely to the storytellers. It is essential to note that

the process of reading, interpreting, rereading, and reinterpreting stories takes time; impatience is

the enemy of insight. The many draftings of the publications based on this research were essential

parts of the analytic process. The themes, arguments, and interpretive findings grew out of our

close reading of the stories in the context of our fieldwork, but our findings were further refined

by the writing process. In narrative research, writing is itself a method of interpretation.

Story texts make our interpretations contestable, an essential characteristic of good social re-

search. For example, in the story “A Happy Ending,” the worker does reference the significance

of race and ethnicity in making a judgment when saying that the client’s “little boy was probably

the only white guy in the neighborhood and the neighborhood bullies were just beating the crap

out of this little guy.” Others examining this story may make more of this point and probe addi-

tional stories among those we present to critically engage our treatment of race and ethnicity.

Such critical confrontations with story texts are crucial to the interpretive process, making clear

that general explanations, like the one we offer about street-level judgments, are never sufficient

for understanding fully the social and cultural dynamics of state power.

NOTES

1. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation grant number SBR-9511169.


2. We worked with teachers in a single school site, but with both police officers and counselors we
   worked in two sites in two different states.


3. See also Dienstag (1997).


4. Our book included complete or near complete transcriptions of approximately a third of the stories
   used in the analysis. All of our stories, as well as entry and exit interviews, and questionnaire data are
   archived at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan.


5. For a recent discussion and an alternative approach, see Feldman et al. (2004).


6. For a detailed discussion, see Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2003, chapter 3 and appendix A).


7. For a copy of the cover page, see Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2003, appendix D).


8. For a list of codes, see Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2003, appendix E).


9. A full discussion of the Citizen-Agent Narrative is in Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2003, chapter 2).