Case Study 2:

Postmodernism and subjectivity: utilising the research method of narrative life histories

 

Introduction

Life history inquiry is a type of narrative research. Jerome Bruner’s (1986, 1996) distinction between two, incommensurable, kinds of knowing – ‘narrative’ and ‘logico-scientific’ (or ‘paradigmatic’) – raises the question of how certain life experiences may best be represented through research. Where inquiry into human behaviour may be open to positivist and rationalist method, inquiry into human experience offers another kind of problem. Here, ‘storying’ has been the traditional mode of representation. As Plummer (1983, p.8) suggests: ‘The telling of a tale of life is no new business, and certainly not one confined to the social sciences.’ The postmodern view is that stories are not only told to recount experience, but to construct identity (Bleakley, 2000b). Richard Rorty (1989, p.xvi), a senior figure in postmodern thinking, notes that a characteristic of the postmodern sensibility is a turn away from ‘theory’ to ‘narrative’.

Cohen et al (2000, pp.165-68) give a succinct overview of life history research. They quote from Plummer’s (1983) seminal text, defining life history research as an ‘interactive and co-operative technique directly involving the researcher’. This form of research does not necessarily follow a postmodern line. The account below distinguishes between uses of life history research within postmodern, humanistic (Plummer’s orientation) and political-emancipatory (Sparkes’ primary orientation) models of inquiry. Life histories in educational research often serve to illuminate tensions between personal desires and institutional expectations, and the postmodern interest here is in the construction and management of identity through story, and not in humanistic ‘self discovery’. In summary, the ‘subject’ of the narrative inquiry is thought to be discovered, revealed or explicated by modernist approaches such as humanistic, personal confessional inquiry (Bleakley, 2000a). In contrast, postmodernist approaches see the method of inquiry itself as a means by which the subject is constituted.

Postmodernists claim that differing kinds of storying and stories produce differing selves or identities (Eakin, 1999). For example, Kay Cook (1996) notes how a ‘medical’ identity is constructed from a variety of ‘stories’, documentation, and representations of the body, such as patient notes, X-rays, doctors’ letters, and so forth. Autobiography, as the major genre for telling a personal story, is noted as a historically recent invention that comes to construct identity in a particular way (often as ‘confessor’). St Augustine’s Confessions from the 5th century AD can be fruitfully contrasted with Rousseau’s Confessions over a millenium later, where the latter constructs a ‘personal confessional’, introspective subject (Smith and Watson, 1996). John Bunyan’s (1666) Grace Abounding is often taken as the first example of such modernist, personal-confessional narrative. Persons deprived of the ability to tell or to understand story through neurological impairment will show identity conflicts, as Oliver Sacks’ popularisations powerfully demonstrate. Persons suffering from symptoms on the autistic spectrum fail to empathise with the stories of others. In this respect the positivist research project, that would invalidate narrative inquiry as subjective and biased, may itself be exposed as demonstrating a kind of autism.

Postmodern narrative approaches encourage reflexivity, in which the patterns and modes of production of identity may be tracked, highlighting issues such as a person’s subjection to the cultural rules of a community of practice into which that person is socialised. For example, in a medical education research project, I track identity production for junior doctors according to their exposure to subcultural regulation such as the norms and habits of the medical speciality around which ward-based learning occurs (Bleakley, 2002).  The surgical culture typically constructs identities that are masculine, active, intolerant of ambiguity, impulsive and tough-minded. The culture of general practice tends, in contrast, to construct identities that are more reflective, tolerant of ambiguity, and tender-minded. Men dominate the surgical culture, while women now dominate the younger end of general practice. (See also Evetts’ (1990) account of women in primary teaching). Identity construction in these examples is then gendered.

The media for narrative inquiry include recorded oral history, stories, annals and chronicles, photographs, memory boxes, interview transcripts, journals, autobiographical and biographical accounts, letters, and other relevant documentation (Connelly and Clandinin, 1999). Because of the rich possibilities of the method, feasibility is a priority. The inquiry may focus upon recollection and reconstruction (retrospective life history) and/or contemporaneous life history. Data may be treated in a naturalistic manner, reported ‘raw’ (although even this ‘reporting’ would be seen to offer a necessary representation or interpretation), explicitly edited and interpreted with reflexive comment, or thematically edited. Later in this section, I will point to the intensity of such research, where the researcher ‘enters’ the life of another in a collaborative venture, opening the door to possible disclosures that turn the research into a potentially therapeutic encounter. Those who follow such a research trajectory must then be sensitive to such possibilities. Knowing the methodology in this kind of research is not enough. In a sense, one ‘becomes’ the methodology.

What does life history research achieve? Through rich, idiosyncratic (idiographic) accounts, we also reference difference and map the processes of construction of identities. Such research accounts may lead to appreciation of stories for their own sake, or may suggest changes in practice and policy. The following case study notes the value of such research in mapping, and giving expression to, marginalised voices, within the project of ‘life writing’ (Smith, 1998).

 

The life histories of PE teachers

Theorising life history research: the problem of ‘subjectivity’ – humanistic vs postmodernist accounts

Andrew Sparkes (1994) has researched the experiences, or ‘voices’, of physical education teachers through ‘life history work’. In this work, he does not claim ‘truth’ or even ‘authenticity’, but wishes to ‘contextualise the individual life story in a wider socio-historic framework’ (Sparkes, 1994, p.6). It is such contextualisation, or relativising, that places the research in the postmodern, although Sparkes also embraces emancipatory research. Sparkes is also concerned not with personal-confessional ‘authenticity’ of teachers’ accounts, but with placing the voices of those who speak in the wider context of ‘the images of the teacher that have prevailed in recent years.’ (ibid.).

Goodson (1992b) sees such accounts as offering potential resistance to the historical marginalisation of teachers as an occupational group, and Sparkes (1994, p.9) sees ‘life history research’ as a way of providing ‘an antidote to the dominant images of teachers’ in the culture. Foucault’s model of identity construction gives central place to the exercise of dominant discourses intertwining power and knowledge (Kendall and Wickham, 1999). This is discussed in Case Study 5: Discourse Evaluation.

This model suggests that all exercise of power as knowledge legitimisation or illegitimisation results in the formation of inclusive and exclusive social practices, and constructs legitimate and illegitimate identities accordingly. However, all legitimating (dominant) discursive process necessarily produces resistance (an ‘outsider’ alternative). Sparkes maps such resistant identities within the physical education culture – which itself is stereotypically a low status subculture within the profession of teaching (and hence already at the margins) – such as the gay and lesbian PE teacher unable to confess to his or her sexual orientation at work and feeling marginalised as a consequence.

Sparkes notes that research on teacher identities, or socialisation into the teaching profession as identity construction, has been thin on the ground. He specifically suggests that challenges need to be made to the dominant ‘images of the teacher that have been socially constructed within the research community’ (1994, p.13). Historically, research studies have tended to concentrate on aggregate roles rather than individual identities. In the 1960s, teachers were studied typically for their roles in categorising pupils, where in the 1970s, teachers were seen as alienated, passive agents structured by the capitalist state, unconsciously acting as reproducers of the dominant relations of production. It is only recently that inquiry has been set up into how teachers’ identities are discursively formed, how resistance to dominant discourse may be mapped, and how self-forming of identity may be achieved as an aesthetic and ethical project. Central to such a project is narrative inquiry, specifically how teachers tell stories of their working lives, and how such stories themselves act as an agency in construction of identity. Goodson (1992c, pp.234-5) notes that such ‘studies which re-assert the importance of the teacher’s voice’ offer an antidote to the current trend for representing teachers in ‘managerial’ terms.

Life history research in the postmodern is then about ‘seeking a methodology which would allow for and value personal voice’ (Munro, 1991, pp.3-4), where it tracks, and reflects upon, how such a voice is ‘positioned’. Such inquiry is of two main types, in some senses paralleling the bifurcation, referred to earlier as ‘reconstructive’ or ‘affirmative’ postmodernism versus ‘deconstructive’ or ‘sceptical’ postmodernism. The affirmative view stresses emancipation and empowerment, and has often been associated with ‘first wave’ or emancipatory (political) feminism. The sceptical postmodern view resists the possible ‘doubling back’ effect of the very process of research as emancipatory, coming to construct the identity of both subject and researcher as ‘active agent’.

Where deconstructive postmodernists promote aesthetic and ethical ‘self-forming’, as an act of resistance to a dominant discourse, they challenge the humanistic-existential tradition of modernism that promotes an unproblematic ‘know thyself’ through introspective account, as the basis to the personal-confessional genre. Again, where the modernist view believes that it is discovering or revealing identity (and hence talks of the ‘true’ or ‘authentic’self), the postmodern view is that an identity is being constructed, not revealed, through the very humanistic-existential methods that claim such revelation of authenticity.

Where postmodernists are suspicious of the claim for transparent self authority, they promote the view that we attempt to understand how selves may be positioned in a social structure (such as marginalised or excluded), and how resistance against such positioning may be articulated. The modernist view that the self exercises sovereign power (unproblematic agency) is challenged by the postmodernist view that power runs through all social practices to produce or constitute selves. Such a process can be mapped to some extent historically and culturally in order to understand how resistance may occur through active self-forming, as an ethical social practice (or lifestyle). Life history research in the postmodern can contribute to such mapping.

Plummer (1983, p.67) outlines the method of life history research as ‘spending many hours talking with the subject, gathering up his or her perceptions of the world, encouraging these to be written down, reading through letters and diaries, and developing an intensive familiarity with one concrete life.’ In Daredevil Research, Jipson and Paley (1997) show how even ‘snapshot’ life history scenarios can afford useful data in researching identity production and self-forming especially for marginalised individuals. Valid documents for such research include diaries, self reports, photographs, letters, home videotapes, interviews and observations.

Again, it must be stressed that if such research merely offers a personal-confessional account, the postmodern opportunity is lost to the familiar modernist tale of a ‘truth-telling subject’. Again, the postmodern researcher asks how the tales the person tells produce identities (which are inevitably plural, challenging the stability of a unitary self promoted by modernism), and how identities are then managed (the aesthetics of self-forming) in relation to issues of inclusion and exclusion or legitimacy and illegitimacy of identities (the ethics and politics of self-forming). This issue is taken up forcibly by French poststructuralist feminist researchers, who map the constructions of gendered identities in a world in which a feminine self is marginalised through language conventions and social practices (dominant discourses) (Cixous, 1997; Irigaray, 1985).

Life history research in the postmodern is interpretivist (Sparkes, 1994, p.15). The epistemological frame has as first principle that every human encounter with the world is ground for interpretation and construction. Such a view is grounded in the Kantian principle that a mindset greets a phenomenon and glosses that phenomenon. Postmodernists differ in the degree to which they interpret this model. There is general disagreement with Kant’s view that such mindsets are universal and invariant (and then form transcendental categories as a ready-made grid of space, time and moral first order principles, which precede and determine perceptions). Postmodernists see a plurality of local, historically and culturally contingent discourses constructing perceptions, where such discourses are open to change and resistance. Recall from Case Study 1 that Social Constructionists see the constructions that precede and inform perception and cognition as afforded historically and culturally and as variable or unstable.

If you do not readily recall this argument

Return to Case Study 1

and renew your acquaintance with social constructionism.

A life history view assuming a stable, unitary and transcendent self prior to experience would suggest that the only ‘interpretation’ that goes on in such research is that of the researcher’s manipulation of the subject’s authentic voice. The postmodern view, however, suggests that the subject is also in the business of interpretation, and it is precisely the selection and interpretation of story that brings the voice(s) into being (for there will be a plurality to identities). The voices are also not ‘private’, but the very notion of ‘private’ is itself a social construct. Rather, the voices are the representation of the processes by which subjection to discourse constitutes the person. The voices are in themselves ‘disciplining’ the person, to use Foucault’s term, as a ‘self-forming’. Thus, again, the research method itself (life history research in the postmodern) does not ‘reveal’ authenticity in voices, but becomes part of the process by which voices are further constituted. In this way, to draw from Derrida’s (1990) early book title Writing and Difference, one writes oneself into ‘difference’. In this process, the contours of exclusion in particular are more clearly drawn, returning us to the political importance of the research method.

 

Doing life history research

Sparkes (1994, pp.16-18) notes that life history research offers a context for a ‘career’ that is the ‘longitudinal perspective’ opportunity (a lifespan) and the ‘latitudinal perspective’ opportunity (‘interests and activities both in and out of school’). Such research sees a life in ‘process’ (not a fixed identity) and the stories of a life ‘cannot be told without constant reference to historical change’, where ‘Life histories provide insights into a person’s identity and sense of self, and the manner in which these develop and change over time.’ Further, the ‘voice’ of the teacher is a social voice, understood in social context and dependent for its quality upon audience. Life history research is then a ‘collaborative mode of engagement’, a dialogue to some extent, in which understanding is necessarily dialogical, challenging the monological voice of authority central to modernist views of sovereign power exercised through unique agency. This is sometimes seen as the defining feature of a life history as opposed to a life story (Goodson, 1992). While the two terms are often conflated, the life history research method stresses collaborative, ‘worked’ accounts that are contextualised or historical. Although we have talked of life history research as a form of recounting and collecting stories, where these are not contextualised historically, life stories are better thought of as autobiography. Autobiography is a self-initiated account, where life history is a product of collaborative prompt (Smith and Watson, 1996; Watson and Watson-Franke, 1985).

Sparkes (1994, p.20) raises the issue of the relative values of idiographic (single case) and nomothetic (general population sample) research approaches, seeing generalisability problems for life history research. However, Sparkes misses the point here for research in the postmodern. While life history research is seemingly idiographic, generalisability is not a problem, for the ‘idiographic’ nature of the individual within a postmodern view already affords a social construction. ‘Identity’ is only read as ‘individual’ within a personalistic/humanistic modernist paradigm. Here, I have discussed identity as an effect of socialisation, for example into the profession of teaching. Issues such as the marginalisation of gay and lesbian individuals within the profession offer a reflection of a larger discourse at work in the culture. That the individual is a product of discourse is an assumption of research in the postmodern. This is not taken as fact or truth, but as a view that is explicitly adopted as resistant to the dominant modernist discourse. Paradoxically, postmodern life history research of the idiosyncratic life is already a historical and cultural history. Sparkes (1994, p.24) does warn against ‘production of accounts that focus exclusively upon personal process and experiences at the expense of any consideration of socio-historical structures.’ This ensures a ‘genealogy of context’ as well as a ‘narrative of action’. It is the genealogy of context that particularly interests researchers in the postmodern, for the focus here is upon the conditions of possibility for the emergence of an identity, including issues of legitimacy/illegitimacy and inclusion/exclusion.

Sparkes’ (1994, p.25) own research in this field with PE teachers in England sets out to investigate, phenomenologically, how PE teachers ‘made sense of their existence in schools’. He raises the issue of sampling in such research within the feasibility of researchers’ resources. While the emancipatory motive focuses upon the potential benefit to every research subject, the issue of social construction of identity is interested in cross-sections of communities of practice (Wenger, 2000). Sparkes devised criteria for inclusion in his study, to gain a cross section of both active and retired PE specialists through ‘novice’ to ‘expert’ bands, career bands, age bands and gender divisions. He used semi-structured interviews as the main method of data collection (three interviews per person, of one and a half hours each). The interviews were recorded and transcribed, and offered to the interviewees to be checked for accuracy (which few actually did). The interview prompts included ‘key themes’ such as ‘the influence of the family in early life, experiences in school, the decision to become a PE teacher, and the influence of significant others in their lives’ (Sparkes, 1994, p.29). Subsequent interviews often followed lines of development indicated in the first interview. Sparkes did not hesitate to follow a collaborative approach, sharing his own experiences as a ‘mutual endeavour’ and a ‘conversation with a purpose’. The interview data was supplemented wherever possible by written documents offered by the teachers.

Sparkes (1994, p.30) characterises his research as an ‘attempt to move beyond the consciousness of individuals to locate their voices in the wider socio-historic landscape that they inhabit.’ He hoped to ‘illuminate … the manner in which (teachers’ lives) are intimately related to and shaped by the lives of others in society.’ The research – a ‘provisional analysis’ – has served to raise ‘awareness of the multidimensional nature of marginality and the impact it can have for those who work as PE teachers in schools.’

Such marginality is seen to be both the cause and effect of low status. Sparkes makes a postmodern turn where his interest in the discursive production of identities of ‘low status’, which he tracks historically to the mind-body split, and subsequent demeaning of the body, resulting from Cartesian rationalism and idealism. The privileging of the discourse of propositional knowing (knowing that) over procedural or practical knowing (knowing how) compounds this. As a consequence, PE – literally a physical education - has suffered at the hands of a curriculum hegemony that promotes the academic and intellectual, or sees the PE curriculum as a ‘supplement’. The resultant ‘experiences of marginality and subordination … are located in a wider web of constraints that shape (the) lives and career opportunities’ of PE teachers in schools (Sparkes, 1994, p.34). Low status leads to less bargaining power for finite resources available in the school and the overall educational system, offering a vicious circle.

Such marginality is acute for women, who suffer a ‘double marginality’ of PE teacher identity and gender identity (Sparkes, 1994, p.37). Sparkes acknowledges that PE teachers do not form a homogenous professional group, where differing identity constructions can be seen within sub-cultures of the PE teachers’ group. One obvious aspect to heterogeneity of the group is gender. Another is age (and inevitable injury problems). Sparkes offers a case study of a woman PE teacher who is also a mother, and how such identities and roles can often conflict. Another difference within the professional group is sexual orientation. Sparkes notes that a ‘triple marginality’ is offered by, for example, lesbian PE teachers, especially where they are unable to ‘come out’ at work, yet may lead active lives within a lesbian community. Here, twin identities are in serious conflict, and both offer marginalised, oppressed positions. A case study of ‘Jessica’, a lesbian PE teacher, concludes that ‘the ongoing dislocation and forced separation of her professional and personal life are exacting a heavy emotional toll’ (Sparkes, 1994, p.45). ‘Jessica’ is forced to ‘construct her life in school according to the prescribed script of assumed heterosexuality’, which also leads her to ‘live away from the catchment area … to protect her lesbian identity from pupils, other teachers and parents’ (Sparkes, 1994, pp.49-50).

What does such life history research teach us? ‘Jessica’s’ story sensitises us to issues of identity construction and management in the margins, and may serve to ‘challenge orthodox and mainstream views of teachers and teaching’ (Sparkes, 1994, p.51). Such issues are also now treated openly, and often sensitively, through the scripts of television soap operas, and the impact of such ‘edutainment’ is yet to be thoroughly researched. Sparkes’ research on the sexual orientations of PE teachers is explicitly political – emancipatory and empowering – following the model of much action research. He exposes oppressive normative power structures and the relationship between such structures and the creation of identities. Aspects of his research can be criticised from a social constructionist viewpoint, as offering a framework that serves to further construct and ‘freeze’ an already oppressed identity, and for the temptation to simply serve up personal confessional tales without reflexively exploring a fabric of discourses through which ‘persons’ themselves are constructed.

 

Research practice issues in life history inquiry

Life history research demands an intimacy of contact between researchers and researched that is unique within educational research. This raises both ethical and methodological issues. The interview process can become a therapeutic encounter (Glesne and Peshkin, 1992). The collaborative outcome can offer a strength to the methodology, although it requires a particular sensitivity on the part of the researcher to know how to distinguish a therapeutic line from a research activity. One view is that sometimes it is fruitless to separate the two (Measor and Sikes, 1992). However, Goodson (1992, p.247) warns that such separation is necessary, where emerging ‘ethical and methodological dilemmas’, such as conflation of research and therapeutic roles, ‘would be best dealt with through clear procedural guidelines’. As well as the ethical considerations, it is important to stress that life history research has a strong aesthetic dimension. There is first the acute sensitivity towards persons telling stories, and second, an appreciation of storying itself (such as genres, style and rhetorical devices of metaphor and image). Hillman (1983) sums up this braiding of storying and storied identity in the title of his book Healing Fiction – offering the dual meaning that ‘fictions’ or stories ‘heal’, or have therapeutic effects, and that, in telling stories and listening to them with awareness, we educate a narrative intelligence that sensitises us further to the aesthetic quality of stories (again: genres, forms, literary devices).

The main point here is that life history methodology is an appropriate mode for researching issues such as identity construction and marginalization. It does not suffer from its idiography – indeed this is a strength of the method – where generalisations are not called for. It is flexible, encouraging the use of a variety of evidence sources. Most importantly, it educates into a narrative intelligence, offering a distinct alternative to rational scientific frames, giving both researchers and the subjects of narratives a frame through which the narrative construction of knowledge may be appreciated (Hunter, 1991), where, as we tell each other stories, so also we construct meanings for events, turning events into experiences. However, as Sparkes (1994, pp.57-9) warns, at the end of the day the researcher comes to make choices about how the life story elements shall be presented (a ‘textual product’), which offers a dilemma bearing on ‘the politics of representation’. (This issue is explored more fully at the end of this section).

The researcher is more than mere editor, and the subjects of research are also actively constituted by that research. It is therefore important that they have first sight of a researcher’s representation(s) of their account(s). The researcher needs to exercise ‘concern … to create an arena’ for the subject’s ‘voice’, where writing out that voice in representation creates a ‘site of moral responsibility’. Sears (1992) reminds researchers in life history and narrative studies that the key attribute is not one of ‘objectivity’ but of ‘empathy’. Sparkes remains unashamedly political: such research turns the privileges of academics into a responsibility ‘to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves’ with the aim of creating ‘solidarity’ and the wider goal of ‘the transformation of existing social inequalities and injustices’. It is here that researchers in the postmodern, passionately interested in the notions of construction and management of identities through story, especially where this bears on marginalisation and transgression, part company with emancipatory researchers. Speaking ‘on behalf’ of another can recreate the self/same:other opposition through which a subtle, paternalistic domination and (mis)representation occurs, no matter how reflexive, sensitive or politically correct the researcher is. Such possibilities are endemic to emancipatory research paradigms.

Sparkes (1994, p.60), drawing on the seminal model of Plummer (1983), dwells on the ‘ethical dilemmas’ of life history research as centred upon an opposition between ethical absolutism and ethical relativism. The first (modernist) view looks for universal principles of ethical conduct in research applicable to all studies. The second (postmodernist) view sees each study as generating its own, local conditions, and demanding a situated ethics, tailored to difference and the unique, or each case. Plummer suggests conflating the two, and Sparkes concurs. Both, however, miss the reflexive point that the primary ethical dilemma rests with a researcher’s choice to adopt, or refuse, an emancipatory role.

In Case Study 4, this reflexive dilemma is illustrated through a focus upon education policy studies research in the postmodern. Here, the ethical dilemma of emancipatory research, that is ‘emancipation by whom, and into what?’ is faced reflexively through deconstructive method. My conclusions concerning Sparkes’ account of life history research, which has been the subject of this section, are:

 

Key ethical and methodological dilemmas in life history research in the postmodern

Narrative methods in general, and life history approaches in particular, are seductive for education researchers. My guess is that, after reading this component, of those who want to try research in the postmodern as a proactive project and not as a reactive critique of established research, many will be tempted to try a life history approach. Stronach and MacLure (1997, chapter 2) offer an account of the complexities of such research both as a celebration of the uncertainties of the method and as potential headache in satisfying the typical criterion of good qualitative research as believable to an informed readership.

The authors recognise the postmodern dimension to life history research as offering a focus upon construction of identity, not as a personal-confessional tale. Their chapter, in summary, offers an account of two differing readings of the same set of data gathered from one subject’s life history accounts. Such data was originally treated in a conventional manner: taped, transcribed and coded for themes. The ‘naturalistic’ element of the research was maintained through sensitivity to a constructive dialogue in which the subject was seen as ‘owning’ meanings. When, however, the subject read through the coded versions or narratives of ‘his’ life story offered in the interpretation of the researchers (whose versions differed from each other’s and from his) he wished to rewrite their versions, seeing them as ambiguous and in need of ‘cleaning up’.

In an existential-humanistic model, the authentic version is by definition that of the subject, and researchers must ethically conform to the subject’s wishes for changes. Further, this is usually described as a central validity check. The key metaphor is ‘dialogue’. For Stronach and MacLure this view raises an interesting dilemma. Lyotard notes that postmodernism has as a key metaphor ‘agonistics’ or creative dissensus, rather than consensus or the exercise of conciliation. Lyotard’s body of work offers the best guide to a postmodern literacy of tolerance of dissensus, incommensurability, paradox, uncertainty, ambiguity and struggle. Why, ask Stronach and MacLure, should the humanistic view be privileged? If ‘subjectivity’ is a site for competing stories that constitute plural identities, does the subject of research ‘know best’? If the research text can be cut adrift from the final authority of the writer as it is open to varying reader interpretations (Roland Barthes’ infamous ‘death of the author’), can the making of the text in the gathering of data not be a contested site of ‘ownership’? Indeed, the best metaphor for the relationship between researcher and subject may be ‘struggle’.

Here, the reflexive researcher struggles with her need to code and theme the text, as a will to power disguised as a will to knowledge, and the reflexive subject struggles with her need to ‘tidy up’ the interpretation of the researcher in a wish to promote a certain favoured identity. Either way, there is no ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ story, and collusion may be disguised as methodological collaboration. At best there is a bricolage, an effect, an impression. But this can have more impact, power and complexity than the ‘tidy’ version, massaged by methodological and ethical correctness. In this respect, the ‘agonistics’ or ‘creative dissensus’ postmodern model reframes the basic principle of action research: that research must be conducted with, and not on, persons, where the ‘with’ is now potentially a creative meeting of difference, rather than a potentially collaborative, but ‘safe’ consensus.

Stronach and MacLure (1997, pp.56-7) offer the methodological advice that paradox is an interesting feature of research, not to be ironed out or seen as a methodological failure. Indeed, the methodological issue raised in the postmodern is that researchers should be reflexively aware of their denial of interesting ambivalence by questioning the basis upon which they ‘secure … their methodological position’. They should attempt to ‘uncover the methods and sense-making procedures’ they apply ‘in order to find/create regularity and stability in the phenomenal world’ and challenge this head-on. The danger of life history research is that interpreted narratives may ‘promote coherence, singularity and closure’ setting up ‘cosy camaraderie with the reader’. Such stories ‘are ultimately conservative and uncritical of prevailing ideological and representational arrangements.’ There is a danger that the life history’s claim to represent teachers or lecturers as they ‘really are’ simply comes to reflect the dominant images of ‘teacher-hood’ that happens to be circulating ‘in the various professional cultures … at any given time.’

In Case Study 6 I discuss a postmodern critique of validity. At this point go to Case Study 6 and read the first paragraph of that section.

Validity in life history research, as in narrative inquiry in general, is hotly debated, but, as I argue below, postmodernists would consider the debate to be misplaced. Plummer (1983) offers four validity (triangulation) checks for life history research, but these concern themselves with the modernist quest for ‘truth’ and researcher ‘trustworthiness’:

Where the postmodern view sees the process of life history inquiry as a factor in construction of identity, such validity checks are seen to miss the point, where they assume some stable, ‘real’ life to be exposed through research (the assumption of humanistic and emancipatory models). Postmodern approaches see life history accounts as necessarily fragmentary, unstable, constituting of identity and ‘virtual’ (i.e., recollections and stories necessarily invent as well as recall, as Freud’s notion of ‘screen memory’ suggests).

Donald Blumenfeld-Jones (1995) offers an alternative ground for validity claims to the modernist claims for ‘truth’, where ‘fidelity’ is suggested as a criterion for practicing and evaluating narrative inquiry. Fidelity is grounded not in a knowledge claim (‘truth’) but in a moral and aesthetic claim (the quality of collaborative reconstruction). While Blumenfeld-Jones agrees that researchers need to collaboratively triangulate their accounts with the subjects of the research, and that attention to factuality is important as an antidote to speculative account, both are seeking an account that is both meaningful and rich in expression (the ethnographer Clifford Geertz famously referred to this as ‘thick description’ – see Gallagher and Greenblatt, 2001). Researchers must realise that storying is an art, even where it is used as a social science research tool. The collaborative re-presentation of life events through story is neither ‘right’ nor ‘wrong’, but open to appreciation. Blumenfeld-Jones sees the tension between reasonable accuracy in representation (the moral or ethical dilemma) and meaningful account (the aesthetic dilemma) as productive, and offers the following as characterising useful, yet aesthetic, life history inquiry:

The final bullet-point above bears on a distinction often drawn in narrative inquiry, between analysis of narratives and narrative analysis (see especially Hatch and Wisniewski, 1995, pp.125-6). Analysis of narratives reduces subjects’ narrative accounts to the codings, classifications and interpretations of researchers. Narrative analysis occurs where the researcher specifically sets out to provide an account of the research data that itself is presented in narrative mode, with explicit attention to both its aesthetics and ethical implications. Bruner’s (1986) ‘narrative intelligence’ must be exercised by the researcher as both a sensitivity to the subject’s account, and in the reformulation of that account through aesthetic modes, such as a more literary than academic account. Sparkes (1996) offers a short guide to ‘writing the social in qualitative inquiry’ through a number of genres: confessional, impressionist, narratives of the self, poetic representations, and ethnographic drama and fictions. Again, for the postmodernist, these genres are not neutral media for representation. Rather, the genre is an active force in constituting an identity. Writing in the confessional style produce ‘confessors’, writing ethnography produces persons situated in a cultural web (‘natives’, ‘citizens’, ‘immigrants’), writing a poetic representation releases identity from concreteness and literalism (social realism) and asks for invention and elaboration through the identity of ‘poet’, and so forth.

 

References

Bleakley, A. (2000a) Writing With Invisible Ink: narrative, confessionalism and reflective practice. Reflective Practice. 1:1, pp. 11-24.

Bleakley, A. (2000b) Adrift Without a Life Belt: reflective self-assessment in a post-modern age. Teaching in Higher Education. 5:4, pp. 405-18.

Bleakley, A. (2002) Pre-registration house officers and ward-based learning: a ‘new apprenticeship’ model. Medical Education, 36:1, pp. 9-15.

Blumenfeld-Jones, D. (1995) Fidelity as a criterion for practicing and evaluating narrative inquiry. In J.A. Hatch and R. Wisniewski (eds) Life History and Narrative. London: The Falmer Press, pp. 25-36.

Bruner, J. (1986) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. London: Harvard University Press.

Bruner, J. (1996) The Culture of Education. London: Harvard University Press.

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