Narrative Inquiry
A qualitative methodology that treats stories — told, written, or otherwise composed — as both phenomenon and method. Researchers study how people make sense of experience through narrative, using participants' stories as primary data and often constructing narrative accounts as the analytic product.
Three-dimensional inquiry space
Clandinin and Connelly (2000) frame narrative inquiry along three intersecting dimensions drawn from Dewey's theory of experience. Temporality attends to past, present, and projected future — events are read as moments in a life course. Sociality covers personal feelings, hopes, and reactions alongside social conditions, environments, and other actors. Place foregrounds the specific physical and topological settings where events unfold. Narrative inquiries move within and across these dimensions rather than treating any one as background.
Methods
Common data sources include life-history interviews, journals, autobiographical writing, field notes, photographs, and classroom artefacts. Analysis can foreground narrative form (plot, voice, turning points) or thematic content across stories. The researcher's own narrative position is treated openly — fieldwork relationships and the negotiation of texts with participants form part of the report rather than being bracketed out.
Use in applied linguistics
Narrative inquiry has become a major strand in language teacher cognition, learner identity, study-abroad, and language-and-migration research. Barkhuizen, Benson, and Chik (2014) consolidated the methodology for second language acquisition, distinguishing oral, written, and multimodal narrative data and surveying analytic options from thematic and structural analysis to dialogic and performative approaches. Common forms include teacher diary studies, learner language histories, and short narrative frames designed to elicit comparable stories across participants.
Distinction from related approaches
Narrative inquiry overlaps with Case Study and Qualitative Research more broadly but is distinguished by its commitment to story as the unit of meaning and to lived experience as temporally and socially situated. Where Grounded Theory aims at generalised conceptual theory, narrative inquiry typically preserves the particularity of individual lives.
References
- Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (2000). Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research. Jossey-Bass.
- Barkhuizen, G., Benson, P., & Chik, A. (2014). Narrative Inquiry in Language Teaching and Learning Research. Routledge.