Storytelling in Research
Stories depict the lived experience in context.
Stories offer a holistic view of participants’ lived experience. Stories allow us to gain insights into their cultures and locales, natural and social worlds. We ask for stories, broad or focused, in interviews and focus groups. We collect narratives from hand-written diaries or online posts. Once research is completed, we find ways to tell stories that bring findings to life. In this Sage Research Methods Community collection, find open-access articles and ideas from researchers about how to use storytelling in research.
What are narrative methods? In this post find a description, and a collection of books and open-access exemplars that use qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches.
In this post, Sara Johnson reflects on the role of multimodality in student storytelling as it emerges in her work and her research into that work.
Find posts and open-access articles about storytelling in the data collection stage, and in communication about research that reaches diverse readers.
This collection of open-access SAGE journal articles show a variety of creative and participatory methods used when studying youth.
Dr. Kara discusses the value of stories for research purposes.
As a researcher, you have an important story to tell, one that can have a positive impact on society. Whether it’s a public health message or a novel technique to share with your peers, everyone is better off when your work is visible.
But academic articles are a tough read and discourage most people. So how do you engage your peers and the public while shining a light on your research?
How can you communicate research findings visually?
See these tips for ethnographic writing.
Thomas describes her research experience with diary methods.
Stories can reveal otherwise hidden truths. Read about ways that storytelling can enhance research.
Learn about using qualitative data visualization in visual storytelling.
Read a collection of open access articles to explore the use of qualitative narrative and visual methods in Indigenous research.
Whose story do you tell in a study? To whom does the story belong? How do you write a research story?
Learn about qualitative data analysis approaches for narrative and diary research in these open access articles.