Understanding Narrative Inquiry

This text is a comprehensive introduction to narrative inquiry in the social sciences. It provides students with the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of this popular approach to qualitative research, along with practical guidance on research design, data collection, data analysis and interpretation. Several extracts from narrative studies are included in chapter 9, together with questions for discussion. With chapter-opening vignettes illustrating a graduate student’s research dilemmas, the book not only guides students with how to process narrative inquiry, it also helps raise their consciousness about what it means to be a qualitative researcher, and a narrative inquirer in particular.

Author Biography

Jeong-Hee Kim is a Professor of Curriculum Studies in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Texas Tech University. Kim is a curriculum theorist, teacher educator, and narrative inquiry methodologist. Her research centers on various epistemological underpinnings of curriculum studies, focusing on phenomenological and hermeneutical ways of understanding the field of curriculum studies and teacher education. She has received two awards—Outstanding Narrative Research Article in 2007 and Outstanding Narrative Theory Article in 2009—from the Narrative Research (Special Interest Group) at the American Educational Research Association (AERA). She has also received the Faculty Excellence in Research/Creative Activities Award from the College of Education at Kansas State University in 2011. Her recent publications can be found in the Journal of Curriculum Studies, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, and Educational Philosophy and Theory. She currently teaches graduate courses on curriculum theory, narrative inquiry, and action research in education.