BU Research Blog

FHSS’ Prof Lee-Ann Fenge & Dr. Kip Jones

FHSS’ Kip Jones and Lee-Ann Fenge are pleased to announce that their article , “Gift Stories How Do We Retell the Stories that Research Participants Give Us?” is now available across several platforms.  Along with the open-access version from Creative Approaches to Research now being available, it can be downloaded on Academia.edu and BRIAN.

Jones and Fenge comment: “We can no longer afford to ignore the great advances made in representation of qualitative data. These have been overwhelmingly demonstrated by the successes achieved in auto-ethnography, poetic enquiry, ethno-drama, film, Performative Social Science and/or other arts-based efforts in research and dissemination”.

Narrative methods contribute greatly to the advances made in qualitative research. A narrative style should also be promoted in publications and presentations. This study on older LGBT citizens in rural Britain highlights this by means of a report on one part of that study—a Focus Group.

Narrative researchers are natural storytellers and need to foreground this when reporting studies for publication. Qualitative research is always about story reporting and story making, and narrative research (listening to and retelling stories) is a key democratising factor in qualitative social science research.