Elite Research Statistical Consulting

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH DESIGN

After you have defined your research questions, aims, or goals, the next step is to identify your research design. Your research questions or goals inform the type of research design that you will use. There are some research designs that are informed by a particular field of study and expanded to other settings and disciplines. Other research designs are informed by theory.

Narrative Research

What is it? A narrative research study is a qualitative research methodology that focuses on collecting and analyzing data to develop a story or a chronological order of events or the life of an individual. It is developed through the belief that people’s experiences are remembered through the use of stories. This means that the outcome of a narrative study has a sequence: a beginning, middle, climax, and an end.

There are different types of narrative studies: autobiography, biography, life history, and oral history. All types of this research emphasize sequence to justify the method to understand a problem or an experience.

Narrative research requires a variety of data collected to understand an experience. The typical types of data are: field notes, interviews, journals, and observations. It involves ongoing collaboration between the researcher and participants, over time, in a place or series of places. The most common narrative research can be described as a methodology which consists of gathering stories about a certain topic where the researcher will find out information about a specific situation.

Collecting and analyzing the data in a narrative study could be overwhelming for a researcher who is unfamiliar with this methodology. This is because the end goal is to organize the high volume and different types of data into a story. Our consultants can provide expert support on the narrative analytic procedures to produce vivid results in the form of a story for your narrative research study.