Quotes and Notes: Clandinin and Connelly – Chapt. 8 (2000)
Clandinin, D.J., & Connelly, F.M. (2000). From field texts to research texts: Making meaning of experience. In Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research (pp. 119-137). San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
C and C warn readers that moving to the research text is perhaps the most difficult transition to make, partly because all things previously considered (e.g., justification, phenomena, etc.) need to be reconsidered in light of what the field texts reveal about the experience of the subjects. Our task is to “ask questions of meaning, social significance, and purpose” (p. 120).
They wrote
it is not so easy to establish a personal sense of justification. To read the literature, one might imagine that expressing personal interests comes easily as a simple expression of the obvious. On the contrary, most of us are astonishingly unclear about what our inquiry interests are and how to justify them in personal terms….Because of this difficulty…we frequently ask people to write a series of stories around their phenomena of interest (p. 122)
Using Clandinin’s doctoral dissertation as an example, C and C tell us that “engaging in narrative inquiry with Stephanie allowed Jean to understand how teacher knowledge is narratively composed, embodied in a person, and expressed in practice” (p. 124).
Phenomena (What?): The Topic?
- What is your narrative inquiry about?
- What is the experience of interest to you as a narrative inquirer?
The phenomena can “shift” depending upon how we position our study of the phenomena. The example in the book is that C and C “positioned the phenomenon of teacher knowledge within classroom practice” (p. 126). This will be helpful to me as I think more about my topic.
Method (How?)
This is the section that really spoke to me the loudest in the whole text.
Theoretical
C and C wrote
Beginning narrative inquirers frequently worry their way through definitions and procedures of different methodological theories, trying to define narrative inquiry and to distinguish it from each of the others, trying to find a niche for narrative inquiry amid the array of theoretical qualitative methodological frames presented to them, but we do not encourage this approach….for narrative inquiry, it is more productive to begin with explorations of the phenomena of experience rather than in comparative analysis of various theoretical methodological frames (p. 128)
Practical Field Text-Oriented Considerations
At some point in our research, we have to leave the field and leave our field texts (which C and C say that we love) in order to get to the research text.
Interpretive-Analytic Considerations
In this context, narrative inquirers:
- create a chronicled or summarized account of what is contained within different sets of field texts (focusing on character, place, scene, plot, tension, end point, narrator, context, and tone)
- narratively code field texts (characters, places, events, story lines, gaps or silences, tensions, continuities and discontinuities)
The ongoing process is the asking of questions that relate to meaning and significance and it is the answers to these questions that shape the research text ultimately. The inquirer “looks for the patterns, narrative threads, tensions, and themes either within or across an individual’s experience and in the social setting” (p. 132). C and C suggest the use of “interim texts” that will help make the transition from field texts to research text.
Epiphany: One possibility for this article is to look at the characters – maybe a dissertation chair/advisor – and gather the meaning and significance of those relationships to the development of a research identity. In fact, I could choose any one of the characters, or anyone of the places, or anyone of the scenes (e.g., diss defense), anyone of the tensions.