Journal of Business and Technical Communication Apr 1994

The Way we do Things here: The Significance of Narratives in Research Interviews

JANE LEDWELL-BROWN ; PATRICK X. DIAS

Abstract

Stories, often dismissed as irrelevant in traditional research interviews, can provide valuable insights into the culture or cultures that pervade the setting within which the research is conducted. Studies of conversational storytelling have demonstrated that narrators not only relate events and conditions but also indicate the significance of their stories by means of story evaluations; that is, they highlight the points of their stories in various ways, such as suspending the story, making overt comments about the importance of an event, and repeating certain key words or phrases. This article demonstrates how story evaluations can reveal a story's significance within an organizational setting by examining two narratives from research interviews that form part of the data in a study of readers' responses to writing in a marketing organization.

Journal
Journal of Business and Technical Communication
Published
1994-04-01
DOI
10.1177/1050651994008002001
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