Читать книгу Analyzing Talk in the Social Sciences - Katherine Bischoping - Страница 19

We now make a transition from using narratives to look back in time, to focusing on what narratives about the past reveal about the perspectives of the present, which include projections about possible futures. The different strategies of doing so involve various degrees of shifting away from positivism and realism toward a constructionist paradigm. What is the ontology of such a paradigm, that is, what can be known through it? Are stories still regarded as routes to an objective reality, as they had been in the positivist/realist paradigms? The short answer to the latter question is that it is not the right question. Following Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) The Social Construction of Reality, narrative analysts understand themselves to know the social world through their research participants’ subjective reconstructions of their experiences of ‘knowing’ and ‘being,’ whether in speaking with others, or – as Frank (1979) points out – simply in talking to themselves.

Some constructionists, such as sociologist George Herbert Mead (1934) would go so far as to say that it is through language and interaction that meanings are formed, altered and disseminated: we narrate and therefore we are. Others such as Neisser (1994) and Collins (2010) would call this too strong a view, pointing out that we have experiences that we do not put into narrative or even language form. How girls experience their clitorises before having a name for them (Waskul et al., 2007) is a case in point. But constructionists all would agree that narrators engage in a host of interpretive processes before a word of a story crosses their lips. To perceive something as ‘experience,’ to recollect some aspects of it and not others, to ponder it, and to begin to express it in language, let alone to make sense of it in storied form, is to layer interpretation onto interpretation (Neisser, 1994; Ochs and Capps, 1996).

Further, any story we tell is contingent on the moment of its telling and cannot be expected to be the narrator’s last word, even if the narrator herself thinks it is. Boje’s study of how stories circulate in an office-supply company emphasizes that ‘[e]ach performance is never the completed story; it is an unraveling process of confirming new data and new interpretations as these become part of an unfolding story line’ (1991: 106). For the epistemological question ‘How do we know via narratives?’ the answer is intimately linked to ontology – we know through our relations with others. Stories must be understood to be socially constructed or ‘literally created’ (Guba and Lincoln, 1994: 111) by a teller and a listener who might never arrive at a shared understanding (Scheurich, 1995). This occurs within a social setting that influences what is salient or tellable, as well as in a broader socio-political context in which stories are inter-subjectively compared.

Given that constructionists revel in the profusion of interpretations, and that analysis is itself an act of interpretation, constructionist notions of rigor are far removed from those of realists, who aim to show that they have reduced error and are closing in on the truth. Donald Polkinghorne (2007) maintains that constructionists should seek to persuade their audiences that their conclusions about narrators’ interpretations are plausible – a softer claim than realists’, but not a simpler one. To warrant it, says Polkinghorne, involves the strategy of explaining how you’ve addressed the likely gaps between the meanings that narrators experienced and the narratives that they’ve provided. For example, if you have interview-based data, you will want to reflect on how well your interviewing methods addressed the inadequacies of language to fully and easily convey meaning, and your capacity to elicit and be trusted with narrators’ self-reflections. Being able to say that you conducted repeated interviews with your narrators, gave them the opportunity to comment on transcripts, or reflected on the differences between theirs and your standpoints (see Chapter 4) would be assets here. Moreover, says Polkinghorne (2007), you’ll want to provide an analysis that does not merely reiterate what narrators have said, but instead delves into its meaning, with claims being grounded in your data. Chapter 3 will outline strategies for orienting to spoken narratives as though they were literary texts.