Is the Story Enough?

somewhat alarming frequency as an ostensible justification for a wide range of creative approaches to qualitative health research writing. While one might argue the common wisdom that everyone has a story to tell, that assertion falls short of meeting any reasonable standard for which stories ought to be understood to have met the bar for consideration as publishable papers. The editorial team for this journal considers thoughtful and critical reflection about such trends as fundamental to the development of our particular genre of science if it is to play a meaningful role within the health knowledge environment rather than disintegrating into some other form of intellectual activity. As narrative inquiry takes an increasingly prominent place in qualitative health research, it seems important to revisit the matter of how we draw those sometimes blurry lines between formal scholarship, journalism, or studiously crafted storytelling. Although we use the term story somewhat loosely to reference the dominant narrative an individual might take in framing his or her experience toward the anticipated needs of a particular audience, in the research sense, we generally intend our reader to consider what we write as reflecting some aspect of a potentially generalizable truth claim, accessed through the lens of the individual account. When narrative inquiry was initially taken up as a formal qualitative health research approach, it explicitly acknowledged the human tendency to shape, tailor, and reframe memory about what happened into a particular literary form that represents a recognizable mode of discourse. In this context, narrative was understood to be a rhetorical device whose ancestry lay in the use of parables for complex social purposes such as collective memory, group identity, and meaning making. Thus, scholars with one foot in each of the health and social sciences found it fascinating to document the manner in which various health and illness experiences were differentially socially constructed and framed into such narrative forms as morality tales, cautionary accounts, or heroic journeys. These kinds of accounts were understood as informative to those who might encounter these health and illness phenomena in practice, so that they might better appreciate the human capacity to sort and organize sometimes chaotic and random experience into coherent and thematic experiential explanations. However, because there was a clear recognition that narrative methodology derived from the study of the human capacity through fiction and many other literary forms to frame ideas toward the tacit receptivity of a particular audience, it was never assumed that experiential accounts, once rendered into narrative form, actually represented forms of truth. What is it then that draws health researchers into this narrative form as a scholarly practice? Certainly the narrative style is a comfortable and familiar cultural knowledge exchange mechanism, something we likely learned at our grandparents’ knees and would love to extend into the engagement with patients if only there was the time. Those of us in the health professions uphold a fundamental commitment to individualizing care, and yet recognize the essential tension inherent in how little opportunity we typically have to get to know our patients as individuals. So, does the narrative research form in some way assuage that guilt and provide us a window into what we might learn if we had the capacity to dive deeper into the story that each of our patients represents? Or is there some notion that, within the story form, we can uncover more intricate and nuanced meaning forms than are accessible using other forms of qualitative interviewing? Certainly the heritage of ethnographic research upon which many of the currently popular qualitative interview approaches was derived held a much more skeptical and critical stance on what story represented in the continuance of culture, belief, and community identity. In that context, rather like the narrative of literary tradition, a story was understood as having purpose well beyond its substance and detail, and was appreciated for its agency in creating particular kinds of meanings. An ethnographer would always assume he or she had tapped only one version of a story and that there might well be many as yet unarticulated layers of meaning underlying the version presented. With the memory of that heritage firmly embedded in the qualitative methodological traditions we have built upon, most Is the Story Enough?