Narrative Inquiry

Much of the data that I've gathered so far for the development of my soccer semantic wiki has been from authoritative sources such as published books and videos, wikipedia and some web site about soccer and coaching soccer. This is a great source of information and it's readily accessible (for soccer), but it has limitations.

First, it's got a limited perspective. Almost all of the authors are older (30+ yrs) men who having been playing, coaching and writing about soccer for a long time. Compared to the population of the world that plays and watches soccer, this is a rather limited sample. Furthermore, this group tends to read each others' work so you'll find a lot of overlap and repetition. Certainly, there is a danger that you're reducing your chances of discovering novelty.

Second, there are many domains of human behavior for which there are not many (if any) authoritative sources. Even when there are, these sources often have gaps. As I've discussed before, there are a number of techniques for gathering data directly from people who are active participants in the domain. One such methodology is narrative inquiry (and the related discourse analysis).

In the past, I've done some reading on narratology (including the classic Morphology of the Folktale by Vladimir Propp) and narrative intelligence, but I haven't done much reading on how to perform the narrative inquiry -- a form of data gathering based on analyzing stories. A quick search has produced a nice long list of books that I can draw on, but first I'm going to lay out a naive method and do some experimentation to get a firsthand feel for the issues.

Below is a naive script that I might use in an interview to elicit a story about a particular domain (in this case I'll use soccer). I'll include my directions (D) and imagined responses (R).

D: Think of a time when you were playing soccer. (Set the domain)
R: Okay, I have one.
D: Tell me about it. (Open ended elicitation of the story)
R: I was playing soccer and I scored a goal.
D: Were you trying to score a goal? (What was the person trying to do at the time?)
R: Yes.
D: What was happening before you scored the goal? (What was the situation?)
R: ...
D: Who else was involved? Anyone else? What were they doing?
D: What could you have done differently to score a goal?
D: Where were you?
D: What enabled you to score a goal?
D: Was any part of this incident surprising and/or unexpected? If so, what normally happens?
D: Think of another time when you were trying to score a goal. What was different/similar about the two situations?

Hmm... well that's a good start. Let's try it out and see what happens.