Exploring the Relational Commitments of Negotiating Narrative Accounts in Narrative Inquiry

Narrative Beginning

My involvement in a community-based food initiative led to my name being mentioned to a group of researchers conducting a study on local food production and global food security. I received an email asking if I would be willing to take part in an interview to share my thoughts on the food initiative I was a part of and which was a site within their larger research topic. After some hesitations I agreed to take part in what was described as a semi-structured interview. Weeks later an interview is scheduled. I meet with one of the research assistants over a tea and am asked several questions regarding my involvement in the local food initiative and larger questions surrounding global food security. About a month after the interview, I receive another email from the research group. This time the email contains a word document with a transcription from the interview. I am asked to review the document and if there are any additional thoughts or edits, I would like to add to the transcript.

This recollected moment occurred several years ago during my doctoral research. It was, and is, a moment I had not inquired into and paid much attention to at the time. Only more recently had I returned to this experience given my involvement in a research project that was narratively inquiring into the lives of Indigenous youth as they composed their lives as leaders within an after-school wellness program. Our research team, comprised of teachers and academics, had been engaging in a multi-year narrative inquiry alongside 10 Indigenous youth. During this time, we had lived alongside youth in different ways. Some of our research team lived intimately alongside the youth for years as teachers, others including myself, negotiated entry through playing alongside youth each week during the school year within the intergenerational after-school wellness program. While we were each positioned differently, we each had engaged with one to two youth from spring 2020 to spring 2022, resulting in a range of field texts which included recorded research conversations (in-person and online), shared artifacts (i.e., drawings), and reflective field notes. As we engaged with this work, at a certain point (winter 2021), we each turned to drafting narrative accounts that would be shared and negotiated ¹ with each of the youth we lived alongside. It was as we turned to these moments of drafting and negotiating narrative accounts with youth participants that I was reminded of my aforementioned experience as a first-time participant in a research project. I was reminded of the uncertainty I held as a research participant around what was being asked of me when I was emailed a word document with a transcribed interview and asked if I would like to edit or add anything. What was the purpose of this step in the research process? Was it to check and verify accuracy of my statements? Was it to extend our conversation for more depth and elaboration? Was it something else? I was unsure at the time, and assumed our engagement rested in the dominant plotline of, is this what you said, are the data accurate? As I engaged in my own research process, a process shaped by the relational ontological commitments of narrative inquiry (Caine et al., 2013; Clandinin et al., 2018), of drafting, sharing, and negotiating narrative accounts with youth (as well as recreation practitioners during my doctoral research), I became more wakeful to how different approaches to research held different methodological commitments and worked toward different goals. While I experienced relational bumping points (Clandinin et al., 2009) through many aspects of the research process in each of the narrative inquiries I engaged in, these tensions became more visible and pronounced in those moments of negotiating field texts with participants. As Clandinin et al. (2009) showed in their work alongside teachers, the co-constructing of field texts are marked by tensions, by cracks and fissures. It is within these cracks and fissures that narrative inquirers purposefully locate themselves as we develop relationships over time with participants in ways that we are not merely asking, are our field texts accurate, but wonders of if our co-created accounts are attentive to the complexity of ongoing life-making, theirs and ours, as they become visible throughout the inquiry.

The purpose of this article is to discuss and make clear the methodological commitments of co-composing and negotiating narrative accounts in narrative inquiry (as defined by Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). While my goal is not to demarcate boundaries and create silos, it is to sit alongside Clandinin and Rosiek’s (2007) chapter that advocated for philosophically informed methodological clarity from those who engage in narrative inquiry. They did so not to police boundaries but to provide clarity toward what we do in narrative inquiry so our practices are not misinterpreted or subsumed. This has led to more recent writings that clarify the purpose of common features in the practice of narrative inquiry such as, narrative beginnings (Dubnewick et al., 2018), response communities (Caine et al., 2021), working with Indigenous Elders (Lessard et al., 2021), and reciprocity (Blix et al., 2024) to name a few. It is expected that this article adds to these methodological commitments and clarifications by reflecting on considerations and purposes of negotiating narrative accounts in narrative inquiry.

Mapping a Landscape for Narrative Accounting

Prior to discussing the philosophical underpinnings of negotiating narrative accounts in narrative inquiry, I suspect it would be helpful to locate this writing amid the broader discussions that have worked toward justifying and clarifying the purpose of negotiating field texts with participants. This method of returning and negotiating what is/was referred to as data as one of the criteria of rigor gained legitimacy among qualitative researchers with Lincoln and Guba’s (1985) work, which named this step as member checking. As these early pushes to create space for qualitative research through language and processes of rigor that paralleled positivist notions of good research, it is not uncommon to read manuscripts that make reference to the use of a member check. Furthermore, given the dominant narrative in research that values the findings of research over methodological commitments, negotiating field texts with participants are often reduced to a simple sentence that reads like a checkbox of rigor—

Transcripts were returned to participant to check for accuracy of the data. Participants were asked if they had any additional comments and/or corrections to the data. Only after participants confirmed the accuracy of the data did we disseminate the findings.

When we, as researchers, read statements such as the one above, we may find ourselves interpreting the research as more trustworthy based on dominant plotlines that denote good research as a process aimed at capturing the truth or an accurate representation of participants experience independent of the researcher. Given this, researchers may implement methods such as member checking and/or judge the quality of research based on such predetermined criteria. Knowingly or unknowingly, this universal, predetermined imposition of specific criteria results in a form of intellectual imperialism by legitimizing certain forms of research over others (Sparkes, 2002; Sparkes & Smith, 2009).

Since Lincoln and Guba’s (1985) early introductions of member checking, numerous scholars began to further clarify what criteria makes good qualitative research, including Guba and Lincoln (1989, 2005). For example, Connelly and Clandinin’s (1990) seminal introductory work on narrative inquiry had a section entitled, “What makes a good narrative? Beyond reliability, validity and generalizability.” In this section, they discussed how it is “important not to squeeze the language of narrative criteria in to language created for other forms of research” (p. 7). As they opened space to resist the imposition of dominant positivistic plotlines of research onto narrative, they identified different features of quality, such as how having an explanatory invitational quality could act as a characteristic of quality among other emerging criteria such as transferability, apparency, and verisimilitude that were under ongoing development (as identified by Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Van Maanen, 1988). In more recent years, numerous scholars have questioned the purpose, usefulness, and relevancy of member checking to verify truth claims (Birt et al., 2016; Koelsch, 2013; Smith & McGannon, 2018). This has led to researchers critically unpacking the underlying positivistic paradigm that grounds the practice of member checking to introduce different reasons, purposes, and practices of negotiating various field texts alongside participants in ways that are methodologically coherent with various paradigms. For example, Birt et al. (2016) outlined a five-step process named synthesis member checking as a model to move toward co-constructed interpretations of findings with participants. Drawing from Braun and Clarke (2013), Smith and McGannon (2018) discussed reframing member checks as member reflections in an effort to move away from attempting to verify the accuracy of data to working toward a process of negotiating field texts as an opportunity to improve data collection and explore differences of knowing between the research and participants. While member checks have been extensively critiqued and reimagined in more coherent ways across different approaches, Guba and Lincoln’s early work is still frequently cited to justify and legitimize member checks as a form of rigor within numerous qualitative research studies (Culver et al., 2012).

As I begin to think with how these dominant plotlines of good research have unfolded over time, I return to the research project in which I was provided a transcript to review. Similar to when I first reviewed, I hold tensions and a certain stiffness as I re-read my transcribed words. Some of the tensions sit in what was provided—a word document that was significantly shorter than what I had expected, given the time we had sat down together. However, I am reminded of the technical difficulties that had occurred with the audio recording device as we began the interview. Other tensions sit in the recollected memories of what was expected and how I could respond to the transcribed text. As I read, and re-read, the email with the attached transcript, it felt as if what was literally being asked was to “review . . . and let [them] know if [I] would like to add or edit anything” (personal communication, 31/08/2016). Given the brief email, I felt as if our engagement was limited to ensuring accuracy of what was recorded, while editing and/or adding to the areas in which the recording device malfunctioned. In some ways, it could be assumed that the research group was performing a member check within what Cho and Trent (2006) described as a move toward transactional validity. Transactional validity is a continual search for objective truth collection because the goal of research and the bracketing of researcher bias through participant validation of transcripts/texts as an essential step to attaining such a goal. I now wonder if the researchers and project I engaged with were shaped by these lingering checkboxes which necessitated a member check to prove rigor for publication, even if such methods of demonstrating good research were contradictory and incongruent amid one’s worldview and approach to research. As narrative inquirers, it is important that we clarify how negotiating narrative accounts fits within larger methodological commitments of narrative inquiry as a relational research methodology to ensure our practices are not subsumed within dominant plotlines of good research (Caine et al., 2013). Given these commitments, I will locate how the negotiation of narrative accounts are situated in the philosophical roots of narrative inquiry while also thinking with the lived tensions of negotiating narrative accounts.

Journeying Toward Narrative Inquiry as a Relational Commitment

In the opening pages of Jean Clandinin’s (2013) book, Jean sketched how her turn to narrative began during her doctoral work as she was concerned that her analysis of teachers’ personal practical knowledge was reducing the wholeness of her participants lives. Jean’s early concerns were similar to my own concerns as I engaged in my master’s research. During that time, I remember being introduced to a range of theorists, some specific to my field (i.e., leisure studies) and some from different fields. As I slowly navigated these discussions, I found myself continually thinking about how I was composing my identity across different community garden places as I stepped into the midst of diverse stories of gardening. Eventually, I found myself being introduced to Lefebvre’s (1991, 2004) scholarship on the production of space as a way to make sense of my experiences. As a beginning researcher, I like Jean, was navigating how to not degrade the epistemic status of experience by foregrounding concepts and theories—in this case, the relational space between my autobiographical experiences and the people and places I gardened alongside—in Jean’s case, the relational space between the teachers she lived alongside and her own experiences. If one were to read my early work (citation omitted for review), you would see and feel my early navigations as I tentatively weave my experiences and storied life-making alongside the application and confirmation of theory. It was not until years after that writing that I was more wakeful to what Jean Clandinin and others were arguing for when they argued that narrative inquiry begins and ends within an ongoing stream of experience (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007).

This does not mean that narrative inquiry is atheoritical, rather it approaches theoretical ideas in a

somewhat upside-down view of the relation of theoretical ideas to experience, that is, a view in which experience is the starting point that takes us to different theories, is a kind of counterstory to the more accepted way of using a particular theory or concept as a lens through which to analyse the experience. (Caine et al., 2022, p. 230)

What is foregrounded in narrative inquiry is lived experiences of who we and our participants are and are becoming as our lives come together in relational ways. These notions of being and becoming wakeful to “the unfolding of a life lived rather than the confirmation such a chronicle provides for some theory” were initially shaped by the work of Coles (1989, p. 22) who shared his own navigations as a beginning psychiatrist where he was urged by one of his supervisors, Dr. Ludwig, to live outside the dominant plotline of reducing patients to psychiatric theories. In many ways, what Jean Clandinin was calling attention to within her own work and for those engaging in narrative inquiry was the necessity of beginning with an interest and commitment to the artistry of ordinary lived experience as the foundation of narrative inquiry. From this beginning, Connelly and Clandinin (2006) explained that:

Arguments for the development and use of narrative inquiry came out of a view of human experience in which humans, individually and socially, lead storied lives. People shape their daily lives by stories of who they and others are and as they interpret their past in terms of these stories. Story, in the current idiom, is a portal through which a person enters the world and by which their experience of the world is interpreted and made personally meaningful. Narrative inquiry, the study of experience as story, then, is first and foremost a way of thinking about experience. Narrative inquiry as a methodology entails a view of the phenomenon. To use narrative inquiry methodology is to adopt a particular view of experience as phenomenon under study. (p. 477)

As Jean Clandinin and others defined narrative inquiry as a relational research methodology, it was less about turning to narrative to tell a compelling story. Rather, the development of narrative inquiry was from the understanding that people, individually and socially, lead storied lives and tell stories of those lives, that narrative is the structured quality of human experience and thus the most appropriate approach to studying experience (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). From these beginnings, narrative inquiry as a methodology was woven alongside a narrative view of experience (as developed from Dewey’s (1938) view of experience] to understand experience as both personal and social, “as lived in the midst, as always unfolding over time, in diverse social contexts and in place, and as co-composed in relation” (Caine et al., 2013, p. 575).

It is clear that narrative inquiries are marked by an ongoing wakefulness to ordinary lived experience; they are also marked by their relational ontological commitments (Caine et al., 2013). While the relational ethics of narrative inquiry was not the focus of Connelly and Clandinin’s (1990) early writing, it was evident that they were naming a different type of ethic beyond the principles and procedures outlined in institutional ethics boards. At that time, they disrupted the dominant plotline of researchers being simple scribes that told stories of the “other” (i.e., participant) by naming and living research relationships with responsibilities akin to friendship, where collaborative stories were co-created through the ongoing negotiation of narrative unities (Clandinin & Connelly, 1988). As these relational commitments developed, numerous people (see Huber & Clandinin, 2002; Huber et al., 2006) shared the complex, and at times messy process, of negotiating unfolding inquiries with the commitment that our first responsibility as narrative inquirers is to the lives of participants. As Caine et al. (2013) wrote, “this composition of a self in the midst of lives and relationships necessitates a shift in attention from methodological considerations about prescribing how to construct research correctly, to sensitivity to the conditions around which we become with each other” (p. 580). Statements such as Caine et al.’s remind me that the implementation of methods alone will not suffice, no matter how well intentioned or planned, that a certain playfulness is needed as we become attentive to the relational in-between spaces where we ask who we are not only in our individual lives, but within our relationships and the broader worlds we interact. As Clandinin et al. (2018) wrote:

A relational ontology requires that we undertake research with an understanding of relational ethics that call us to larger questions of who we are in relation with participants but also who we are in relation with the larger world or worlds that people, including us as researchers, inhabit. This relational ontology interwoven necessarily with a relational ethics calls us to consider mutuality, respect, and reciprocity. But it also calls us to questions of responsibility to the person and to the worlds in which we are nested, to questions of complicity in the worlds within which we currently exist as well as to future worlds that our work leads into. (p. 20)

There is an indefinite stretch as I think with the relational ontology of narrative inquiry. A stretch that moves inward to how lives are being individually and relationally composed in sustaining ways, outward to how lives are shaped by and shape complex landscapes both physical and social, and backward and forward to the temporal unfolding of lives and the reverberations of how our presence has marked each of our lives before, during, and after the inquiry. The implications of a relational ontology marks all aspects of our engagements, from negotiating entry to negotiating narrative accounts, as we work toward honoring the relational responsibilities that exist when we respect ordinary lived experience and the ordinary ethics of everyday life. At this point, I turn toward explaining what narrative accounts are, how they are located with within the relational ontology of narrative inquiry and provide threads for consideration as I think with my experiences of negotiating narrative accounts across projects.

The Relational Commitments of Negotiating Narrative Accounts in Narrative Inquiry

Our small research team gathered on campus in one of the faculty meeting rooms to share drafts of our narrative accounts—it was a shift in place from many of our prior meetings and the many days in which we lived alongside youth at a community building that housed several spaces, including a public library, daycare, several multipurpose rooms and a high school. By this time, we had engaged in four research conversations with each of the youth we were living alongside. Each of us also had a range of field texts from the last two years, for myself those included a researcher journal from my weekly involvement in the afterschool program and a range of participant creations (i.e., annals, pictures, and artistic creations) as the two youth and I found places to sit and talk amidst our days playing. From our early research gatherings, we all knew at some point we would be turning towards composing and negotiating narrative accounts with each of the youth we lived alongside. As we began discussing these turns within our work, I remember a conversation I had with one of the teachers, Ruth, who was a coresearcher on the project. In the meeting prior, she shared wonders of how to compose what we were referring to as narrative accounts and what the purpose of these negotiated accounts were. In our discussions we returned to some of our early conversations where we slowly learned to travel to each other’s worlds (Lugones, 1987). In those moments we listened to how we each storied our living on institutional landscapes in uneasy ways as we shared resonances of how it felt as if the places we worked were structured in ways where we were asked to be inattentive to unfolding of lives—both youth and ours. Stories of fitting youth into schools surfaced, questions of productive outputs from time spent in community, and metaphors of school buses never slowing down or circling back provided us images of our lived dis-ease as various measuring rods of success limited what mattered. While our conversation was not straightforward, there was a sense that narrative accounting was a practice of living otherwise—as being and becoming attentive to the unfolding of lives lived in relation, theirs and ours in playful and imaginative ways. As we gathered on campus to share narrative accounts, her account began with a visual image created by one of the youth participants, Fay, that was given to her as a gift on graduation day headlined with the words “best teacher mom.” In listening to her voice as she read the narrative account, we were invited into who both Ruth and Fay were in each other’s lives and who they were becoming on the landscapes in which they playfully navigated.

As I listened to Ruth ² share of her experiences alongside Fay, there was a certain stillness in the room as she read her account. As her voice narrated the account, my eyes followed the printed words on the page as I sat with my pen prepared to jot notes and wonders as I thought with Ruth. Within the first paragraph, I found my grip on my pen loosening, my eyes wandering away from the type written words and more to her voice:

. . . That gift rocked me to my core that afternoon because on it were the words “best teacher mom.” Fay lost her mom as a young child and often talks about how much that loss has impacted her life so it meant the world to me that she thought of me not only as a teacher but, in some ways, a mom as well. It is now displayed proudly in my new classroom as a reminder of not only her and everything she has taught me, but also that caring for and building relationships with my students is the most important part of my job, as a teacher. (narrative account and personal communication, 10/22/2021)

We did not get through the whole account that day, rather we all sat in that stillness as we began thinking with Ruth. I felt the lingering reverberations of her time alongside Fay working on her, and each of us, in ways that Clandinin et al. (2012) spoke to as “echoes left behind by those who came before” as we felt the “reverberations stretch across, and through lives” (p. 23). These were not just simple accounts that told of an “other,” of what happened or what was said, and we surely were not just sitting down to check for accuracy on that day, nor did we imagine that in the sharing and negotiating of these co-composed texts with participants that our sharing would work outwards from these beginnings. Rather as I think with Ruth’s sharing I am reminded of our responses that day. We began thinking with the reverberations of her living alongside Fay’s, we discussed her transition to a new high school that began that fall—a new pace to the semester, a different rhythm, and an image that proudly lingered on her class wall and within her ongoing life. While we had yet to negotiate these accounts with the youth we lived alongside, within our own response community, we were beginning to become wakeful to how the drafting, sharing, and negotiating of narrative accounts marked our living with relational openings of where we may be able to go from here. The negotiation and sharing of narrative accounts are not checkboxes for rigor, they are not final steps, methods, and procedures to be taken so researchers can legitimize the quality of their research prior to publishing research texts. To name our engagements in these ways would be to degrade the relational ontology of narrative inquiry and the regulative ideals it works toward:

The regulative ideal for inquiry is not to generate an exclusively faithful representation of a reality independent of the knower. The regulative ideal for inquiry is to generate a new relation between a human being and her environment—her life, community, world—one that “makes possible a new way of dealing with them, and thus eventually creates a new kind of experienced objects, not more real than those which preceded but more significant, and less overwhelming and oppressive” (Dewey, 1981, p. 175) In this pragmatic view of knowledge, our representations arise from experience and must return to that experience for their validation. (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007, p. 39)

While what I have written may be named as a negotiation of a narrative account within a response community, our response community shaped how we imagined the living of negotiating narrative accounts with participants. Drawing on the work of Arendt (1958), Caine et al. (2021) wrote of conceptualizing response communities as spaces of appearance where we reveal “who” rather than “what” we are, where we become more visible to ourselves and others in ways where we continually become relationally responsible to one another and in doing so “make possible new ways to engage in the social and political worlds that shape the lives of participants and our lives. . .” while also stating that the “. . .space of appearance is not just present in response communities, but is made possible and sustained within the larger world because of response communities” (p. 665). As I read their work on response communities in narrative inquiry and think of my own engagements within our response community, I begin to wonder of the other possible places of practice where we as narrative inquirers can, and should, live similar relational commitments. Commitments which perhaps can be described as commitments to co-composing microworlds of friendship, ³ where both participants and researchers come together, in ongoing ways as their lives unfold over time, attentive to not only who we are becoming in each other’s lives but who we may become in our broader social and political worlds—with the negotiating narrative accounts as a place of practice where spaces of appearance are made possible and sustained through our sustained commitments to becoming attentive to ordinary lived experience, theirs and ours as they unfold in relation. In this way, negotiating narrative accounts are part of our commitments to friendship, they are intentional, concrete actions that occur in our little in-between world of friendship where we can imagine our lives as otherwise. When the negotiation of narrative accounts are conceptualized in this way, they are less about legitimizing rigor through end points of data collection and more toward the relational ontological commitments of narrative inquiry.

While what I have sketched out above hopefully makes clear the purpose of negotiating narrative accounts within the relational ontological commitments of narrative inquiry, they are developed from Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) early work as they wondered how to name this aspect of narrative inquiry:

When narrative inquirers return to participants with text, their question is not so much, Have I got it right? Is this what you said? Is that what you do? Rather, it is something much more global and human: Is this you? Do you see yourself here? Is this the character you want to be when this is read by others? These are more questions about identity than they are questions of whether or not one has correctly reported what the participant has said or done . . . For now, as a kind of placeholder in our own thought, we use the term participant signature to capture what we have in mind, but a different more enriched term, might be more appropriate to our understanding. We imagine a term that recognizes the influence of participants on the signature of the text, a term that recognizes that the signature may be negotiated among researcher and participant. (p. 148)

As I read these early wonders of negotiating texts with participants, it is clear that all texts (i.e., field, interim, and research texts) within narrative inquiry are always understood as co-composed and negotiated in relation. It is also understood that co-composing begins much earlier than the writing, sharing, and negotiating of interim texts, that it begins in experience, in the relational space between participant and researcher as their lives unfold in relation. In some narrative inquiries, the relational in-between space, or attentiveness to participant signature, becomes very visible in public texts. This can be seen across several of Janice Huber’s writings, with one of her more recent writings sharing how she awakened to the need to create interim texts with Suzy, a child participant, in ways that were attending to her “everyday ways of knowing, being, doing, and relating (and the materials and processes) through which she chose to share,” through the content and form of playdough and poetic form (Huber, 2020, p. 47). While not all narrative inquiries show the same depth of relational resonance to participants lives as Huber’s work, there are clear commitments in narrative inquiry that all texts are co-composed and negotiated in relation and hold relational responsibilities. As narrative inquiry was developed over time, interim texts ⁴ in the form of narrative accounts were named as a helpful design consideration as inquirers attempt to imagine and live their unfolding inquiries in relationally ethical ways. From these developments, Clandinin (2013) spoke to the process of negotiating narrative accounts as a form of narrative accounting which she described as a process that:

Allows us to give an account, an accounting, a representation of the unfolding of lives of both participants and researchers, at least as they became visible in those times and places where our stories intersected and were shared. In our use of the term narrative account we strive for a sense of being morally responsible to each other and to our negotiated relationships as well as our negotiated texts. We work towards a sense of mutuality and co-composition in what we write. (p. 132)

Clandinin positioned narrative accounts as a way of being and becoming relational responsible to participants. The drafting and negotiating narrative accounts are not smooth processes for many with Clandinin and Connelly (2000) writing about these poignant moments as ones that are frequently filled with doubt, uncertainty, endless false starts, nervous anxiety, and fear as there is a visceral knowing that “the written research text will alter the working relationship between the researcher and the participant” (p. 135).

Conclusion

For many researchers, these moments or series of moments in which we negotiate interim texts with participants may seem to be a “natural” ending or exit in which we have fulfilled our responsibilities as researchers prior to finalizing research texts. While this may be rationalized and legitimized within certain plotlines of research, it is not coherent within the relational responsibilities of narrative inquiry. Furthermore, such logics would run counter to the pragmatic underpinnings of narrative inquiry which problematizes the boundaries of inquiry as we think with the inevitable spillover and indefinite stretch that lives in the relational spaces between participant and researchers streams of experience and their broader social worlds (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007). Much like how Ruth’s life and practice has, and is, continuously enriched and transformed through her relationship with Fay as seen through the visual image that proudly sits on her classroom wall. In narrative inquiry, we understand the negotiation of interim texts in the form of narrative accounts as intentional acts toward mutual co-composition that do not signal an ending or confirmation of accuracy but a commitment to our long-term relational responsibilities, where our negotiated accounts signal our commitments to playfully imagining how we may appear and act in relation to each other and to our worlds in sustaining ways.