On Mon, 10 Nov 1997, Martin Packer wrote:
> I might add that in a narrative I can locate myself, as something other
> than the omniscient but hidden-by-the-third-person academic.
>
> As I write this story I make endless decisions about what to higlight and
> what to background, and I've come to see this *as* analysis, of a kind that
> doesn't reduce the complexity of events to theoretical abstraction. And
> I'd like the people I worked with to read what I've written and say, 'yes,
> that's right, and we now understand a little better what we were trying to
> do, what went wrong, and what we can do next.' A narrative (I hope) can
> do this in the way that a quantitative analysis, for example, can't.
>
I am not sure if I am reading your post correctly, but it seems to me that
you have placed a sharp division between "narrative" and "quantitative
analysis." I wonder, though, if these are appropriate
comparisons. It sounds as if you are comparing a final product (a
narrative) with an analysis (quantitative). This strikes me as
inappropriate for two reasons. First is the comparison of a final product
with an analysis but also I question how you are using the term narrative.
Might you mean qualitative research? If so, I might better understand why
you chose to compare it to quantitative analyses. Clearly, I have a
vision of narrative as being a part of qualitative research while not
equivalent to it. For instance, within a qualitative presentation, I
see more than the opportunity to use narratives--there is no need, in my
eyes, to use only one genre. In fact, given the way academia and the
publishing world work, I wonder if you could even present a work of
empirical research that is solely within the genre of narratives.
Anyway, I would love to hear more about your thoughts on narratives and
participatory research.
Lenora de la Luna