322 ANALYZING DATA
tive research. Nevertheless, we were compelled to ask how we could get others to tell their stories
in a form that is useful for interpretive social researchers. In making these decisions, how do we
honor the people whose stories we acquire and the words they render?
For starters, we decided not to impose aesthetic demands on our storytellers. Only some story-
tellers are gifted writers or raconteurs; others whose stories are equally as important to tell are less-
gifted storytellers. With the focus of our research on questions of meaning, judgments, and decision
making in everyday life, we selected storytellers who would enable us to capture a diversity of
perspectives on whether and how notions of justice and injustice give meaning to street-level work
and decision making, keying on differences in seniority and experience, gender, race and ethnicity,
and generations of workers. In embracing a diversity of perspectives, we dedicated ourselves to
analyzing many stories over few, as well as those told by gifted and less gifted storytellers. Still, not
all the stories we collected shaped equally our developing interpretations. Stories are not cases in a
data set, each contributing proportionately to our findings. Some stories, fully rendered and well
told, were particularly valuable for revealing the voices of the workers and summarizing key inter-
pretive findings. We illustrate the value of such stories in the conclusion of this chapter.
In addition, we anchored our interpretations in the comparative analysis of stories collected in
five different organizational settings or “work sites.” We looked for points of shared meaning and
discursive tension within work sites. For example, the counselors we studied worked together in
local vocational rehabilitation field offices, police officers were members of squads who shared
shifts and beats, and teachers worked as members of the eighth-grade team of an urban middle
school. This approach provided us the opportunity to see what patterns of meaning making among
workers were unique to specific work sites and types of street-level workers and to judge whether
some patterns carried across site and type of worker.Problem of Gists. Whereas in picking storytellers we emphasized diversity of the tellers over
aesthetic criteria of the telling or the tale, we wanted stories that were fully rendered. Some stories
that are well known to insiders, and are therefore culturally potent, are often told to other insiders
with only a brief reference or gist. For example, a faculty member in an academic department
discussing a current tenure case may say, “Remember Professor Smith.” This brief reference may
signal an elaborate narrative to colleagues: “Professor Smith was denied tenure because she never
finished her book. When finished, the book was acclaimed, and Professor Smith became a star.”
Or, “Professor Smith was well liked but marginal, and, after we tenured her, she became a dis-
gruntled and unproductive colleague.”
Clearly, gists carry meaning to insiders, but they offer little interpretive guidance to the out-
sider: An outsider would not necessarily know what the gist of “Remember Professor Smith” is.
Although we engaged in intensive participant-observation with our storytellers, we never pre-
sumed to be in the position of insiders. Thus, one essential criterion of a good research story for
our purposes was that it was told in a fully rendered version, one that was intelligible to both
insiders and outsiders. Full rendering of stories—fleshing out the gists in the stories narrated by
insiders—can require deliberate effort by the researcher.Accurate Accounts or Fiction? Another issue that is troubling to social researchers, especially
those who think of social science as a means of discovering replicable facts, is that stories often
blend elements of nonfiction and fiction. Many stories have a foundation in actual events and
individuals, but the telling and retelling of stories allows considerable adaptation of those social
realities. Some stories conflate events and characters, while others embellish or invent them.
Accounts and inventions can be so intermingled as to become indistinguishable. When studying