Narrative inquiry, between detail and duration

Abstract

The specificity of narrative inquiry is to seek to understand the lived experience by collecting first-person narratives. The principles on which its relevance is based are as follows: the apprehension and understanding of the processes of edification of the “points of view” from which the situations experienced by the people involved in the inquiry are thought to be constructed from two phases: that of the experience in language - either the putting into words of the lived experience - then that of the configuration of the words into texts, or the putting into narratives. The asserted need to support these processes stems from the following postulate: starting the investigation implies that one must carry out the work of grasping one’s own experience according to different time scales from which the narration of the experience can be accomplished. Thus, by aiming at the expression of the experience “in first person”, the “inquirer“ (who may be a researcher, a trainer, a career guidance counsellor) does not take information on the experience of others. He or she uses guidance procedures whose effect is to encourage the “entry into the investigation” of the persons with whom he or she is seeking and working. This leads us to consider that narrative inquiry is a form of inquiry “necessarily in the first person” since only the person who has experienced a phenomenon is able to say, from his or her point of view and in his or her own words, what he or she has experienced, the effects he or she has felt, and the resulting experiential and biographical repercussions.