The Teller, the Tale, and the One Being Told: The Narrative Nature of the Research Interview

ABSTRACT

Narrative structures are readily available in our culture and people automatically draw on them in most meaning-making activities. The research interview is one of many such activities. Narrative structures influence how informants remember their experience and subsequently tell researchers about it in an interview. Researchers also draw upon narrative structures because they hear and understand in narratives. Informal or implicit interpretation as opposed to explicit interpretation are discussed. The “iceberg” metaphor is used to describe the two kinds of interpretation. The tip of the iceberg is explicit interpretation, which is what researchers write in their research reports. The biggest part, however, is informal interpretation. It is out of sight and usually unexamined because it is built into the strategies researchers employ to make sense of data.