Flirting with the Boundaries: Artistic Spaces, Social Science Spaces and Narrative Inquiry

Abstract

Narrative inquiry is a subset of qualitative research design, which is increasingly flourishing in constructing knowledge, especially in the field of social science. Nevertheless, narrative as an approach to doing social science research is still in the making and this leaves the narrative researchers with multiple meanings and ambiguities in relation to using narrative inquiry in scholarly research. Significant questions are raised regarding the possibility and the applicability of using narrative as a mode of social inquiry. Often, it is argued that narratives inhabit artistic spaces as well as social science spaces and hence, the application of narrative as a method of inquiry is questionable. The main focus of this article is to explore how far narrative inquiry represents artistic worlds in terms of its main characteristics and the criteria which are significant in considering it as a social science inquiry. The main argument is that narrative inquiry inhabits dual spaces; the social science and the artistic. It critiques the idea that narrative research is mere fiction and concludes that it should rather, be understood as an alternative mode of knowing the world, to the widely accepted, formal, positivistic ways of coming to know.