Research Methods for Information Research

5. Other Methods

5.4 Collecting Stories

There are a number of ways of showing that an innovation is bringing about change, ranging from measuring increased service activity to taking ‘before’ and ‘after’ photographs, but if you want to find out about real changes in what people are doing and how they are being affected, collecting stories systematically offers a valuable form of evidence and should also be useful in advocacy.

But whose stories are of interest and how should we go about collecting them? If you are undertaking impact evaluation of a service, you may want to collect stories from the people providing that service. The advantages are twofold: the local service providers should have some understanding of why you want to collect the stories as well as what sort of stories to collect and they are relatively easy to contact. Stories representing the views of the providers can be valuable if you can persuade them to tell the ‘warts and all’ version of the story (not just the good news) and if you also try to tap into the views of the people who are using the service. It may be difficult to get a sufficiently wide range of stories from service users unless you go about the task by thinking about when to try to make contact. There are no hard and fast rules here but two potentially useful approaches are to try to set up story collection sessions when the people you are interested in come together for another purpose (standing a round of drinks at the end of a meeting just might pay dividends!) or when they have finished a particular session using the service, in which case that encounter might be the critical incident that you get them to tell you about (see section 3.7). Critical incident interviewing is a form of structured question-led story telling.

An issue for story collectors is how much structure to provide. Do you want to adopt the ethnographic researcher’s standpoint of trying to get people to tell their own stories in their own way (‘capturing authentic voices’ in the jargon), in which case you will have to listen actively to a good deal of conversation that might seem tangential to the topic that interests you. Instead, you may like to use triggers such as photos of people using the service to act as a stimulus to and focus for storytelling, or may go equipped with a set of open-ended questions to get people started.

Even if we opt for the ‘naturalistic’ story gathering approach we should not fool ourselves that we are collecting the unvarnished truth. As David Silverman points out¹² “telling someone about our experiences is not just emptying out the contents of our head but organising a tale told to a proper recipient by an authorised teller”. In our role as ‘proper recipients’ we have to watch what we are doing as well as what the storyteller is trying to bring about.

The next issue is about editing. Who decides which stories to use as evidence and in how much detail? You may want to get members of a community to choose their own representative stories, rely on service managers to select a range of views, or even hire in someone to take on the task more independently. Some years ago I helped to set up an experimental information service aimed at all local education authorities in England and Wales. At evaluation time we hired an education journalist to prepare a set of prompt questions, distribute these to the link-people nominated by each authority and ask them to gather stories from their colleagues about using the service. The journalist then edited the results into a formal evaluation report on the service which was submitted direct to the project funder. This was a rare example of delegating the entire evaluation process to the users and their orchestrator.

There are a number of more systematic approaches to collecting stories as part of impact evaluation¹³. The essence of most of these approaches is that you should be thorough in collecting stories of success and failure and should then use them as a focus for gathering more evidence to see if the stories describe one-off effects or are representative of the bigger picture. The question of how representative a picture is being presented through stories is a difficult one – how can any unique story represent a common experience? However, some attempt has to be made to indicate whether what is chosen as evidence is broadly representative or if it is an interesting (and hence potentially illuminating) exception. This issue of contextualising the evidence as carefully as possible is probably what distinguishes the use of stories as evidence and the presentation of stories for advocacy. Both are legitimate pursuits: the dangers start when these activities (and the use of stories) are conflated.

12. Silverman, D. A very short, fairly interesting and reasonably cheap book about qualitative research London: Sage 2007 ISBN 978-1-4129-4595-0 ↩

13. See for example Brinkerhoff, R.O. The Success Case method: find out quickly what’s working and what’s not San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers 2003. ↩