Narrative Inquiry

This chapter examines narratives as more than a sequence of events, framing them as processes of knowing and identity construction. Narrators negotiate their relationships with society and generate meaning interactively with audiences. The author highlights how narrative inquiry serves as a methodological tool to explore these dynamics, emphasizing the importance of researchers’ subjective positions, self-reflection, and collaborative relationships with participants. The author outlines how narrative inquiry accommodates various approaches, including examining others’ stories (e.g., life stories) or researchers’ own experiences (e.g., autoethnography). Art-based methods such as fiction, poetry, and visual formats, alongside digital storytelling, provide creative ways to record and present narratives. Narrative analysis includes structuralist approaches that focus on critical events, actions, and consequences and holistic frameworks that link identity, past experiences, and social relationships. These methods allow researchers to reconstruct dynamic, multidimensional understandings of narrators’ lives and how they interact with their social contexts.