Fundamentals of Narrative Research: Why Stories Matter

Fundamentals of Narrative Research: Why Stories Matter

Long before there were surveys, focus groups or behavioural science, there were stories. For most of human history we’ve used narrative to deliver knowledge from one person to another. Stories helped communities pass on practical skills, explain where they came from, establish social rules and warn each other about danger.

There is evidence that storytelling has played this kind of role for a very long time. Research among the Agta, a hunter-gatherer population in the Philippines, found that many traditional stories contained lessons about cooperation and social behaviour. Camps with more skilled storytellers also tended to show higher levels of cooperation.

Storytelling, then, was never just entertainment. It was part of how people learned how the world worked. Ancient philosophers also understood its influence. In The Republic, written more than 2,000 years ago, Plato has Socrates argue that the stories children hear should be carefully controlled. His concern was that stories about gods and heroes could shape character before a child was old enough to question what they were hearing.

The point is striking because it recognises something we still understand today. That stories can influence people without feeling like instruction. They create examples of what happens when people behave in particular ways. They show what is rewarded, what is punished and what kinds of futures are possible. When we need to communicate our thoughts or experiences, they provide a structure.

Ask someone how their holiday went and they will usually tell you what happened. Ask why they left a job, disliked a restaurant or changed their mind about a brand, and the answer tends to take the same form. There is a sequence. One thing leads to another. Some moments matter more than others. Causes and consequences begin to emerge.

Stories help us impose order on experience and they also help us think about experiences we have not had yet. Before making a decision, people often imagine what could happen next. Someone considering changing energy supplier might imagine the holiday they went on using the money they saved on their bill, or alternatively they might imagine the endless phone calls of a difficult switch. Neither of those imaged futures might happen, but their internal narrative still significantly shapes the choice.

This idea has become increasingly important in behavioural science. You may have heard of System 1 and System 2. System 1 is our fast, emotional and intuitive thinking. It relies on instinct, habits and mental shortcuts, and helps us make everyday decisions quickly without much conscious effort. Whereas System 2 is slower and more deliberate. It comes into play when we stop to think, weigh up information, compare options or solve a problem consciously. This narrative imaginative process is separate to System 1 and 2, yet has major impact on our decision-making process.. At Irrational Agency we call this imaginative process System 3. But how can we access our System 3 thinking? Narrative research provides a way of exploring it.

What is narrative research?

Narrative research examines the stories people use to make sense of experiences, decisions and the world around them. That sounds simple, but it changes the role of the participant considerably. A conventional research question might ask someone why they bought a particular product, or what mattered most or what they are likely to do next? Those questions can be useful. The problem is that they rely on people being able to identify and accurately report the causes of their own behaviour. Narrative research is less dependent on that assumption. Instead, we might explore what happened around a decision, how an experience unfolded, what the person expected beforehand or how they imagine a future situation playing out.

Take an everyday purchase such as choosing a snack. Someone may say that taste and convenience were the main reasons for their choice. But when we explore the wider story and other details may appear. Perhaps they had skipped lunch. They wanted something filling but did not want to feel as though they had bought junk food, or a similar product had disappointed them a week before. Perhaps they were about to get on a train, and imagined consuming the snack on the train and thought about how people might perceive them, would the snack have a particular kind of smell that would make them feel self-conscious to eat it in public? None of those details necessarily appears when the consumer is asked to rank their motivations. Together, however, they give the decision context.

Memory is reconstructive. We simplify decisions when we explain them. We can produce plausible reasons for behaviour after the event without being fully aware of what influenced us at the time. Future behaviour creates another difficulty. Ask someone whether they will buy an electric car in three years and they can give you an answer. But in many cases, they are being asked to predict themselves in a situation they have never experienced. A narrative approach can explore the imagined future in more detail. So instead of asking “are you planning on buying an electric car in the next three years” we might instead ask, “What do they imagine owning an electric to be like?”

The aim is not to assume that the story will come true the useful information lies in the assumptions being used to construct it. Those assumptions can reveal expectations about the category, beliefs about how other people behave, emotional barriers and anticipated consequences that may be difficult to uncover through direct questioning alone.

From stories to evidence

Narrative research is not simply about collecting anecdotes. In qualitative work, researchers use open, participant-led interviewing and memory retrieval techniques to help people reconstruct experiences in detail. This is far more complex an endeavour than forcing every participant through the same set of scripted questions. It is closer to a conversation than a research interview and requires unique skills. The researcher allows the story to develop and then examines what is present within it in the multiple stories collected during the research patterns begin to emerge.

Narrative approaches can also be used at larger scale, where stories are analysed systematically to identify recurring concepts, relationships and structures across a population. This doesn’t require new technologies but does require different ways of asking questions. In both cases, the story is not the final output but the evidence from which a deeper model of the decision can be built.

Market research has traditionally been very good at measuring what people say they think. Behavioural science improved on that by showing that much of behaviour is shaped by forces people cannot easily articulate heuristics, biases, context, habit and automatic responses. Narrative research is an evolution in behavioural science, another piece to that picture. People make sense of their lives through stories. They use past experiences to understand the present and imagined futures to guide what they do next. That behaviour is not new. It predates modern research by thousands of years. The opportunity is simply to take it more seriously as a source of evidence. Because when people tell stories, they are often revealing more than what they think, they are showing us how they believe the world works.