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The purpose of this chapter is to make visible the similarities and differences among narrative, self-study of teacher education practices, and autoethnographic methodologies to generate clarity about when each methodology might be most appropriate. Using Margery Wolf’s (1992) A Thrice Told Tale as a heuristic to support our exploration, we look at a selected slice of data as if standing within each methodology. As we do that we consider ways that we might engage each methodology to push forward our thinking about powerful research. Our goal is to critically examine the processes that researchers use for the study and to explore the ways using particular methodologies in appropriate ways that can strengthen our thinking about professional knowledge.

Purpose – This chapter explores the complexity and tensions inherent in the question of how story becomes research with particular attention to the use of narrative research in studying teacher education.

Approach – To do this, we begin each section with a narrative fragment from earlier published research in which we collaborated (Hamilton, 1995). Then, we use narrative research analysis tools to explore the meaning of each fragment, lay that understanding alongside research accounts and wonderings about research in and by teacher educators, and consider the fragment in terms of specific understandings of narrative inquiry as research methodology for studying teacher education.

Findings – This chapter examines when story moves to research while probing the tensions between knowledge and living as teachers, teacher educators, and teacher educator researchers. Using the first fragment, we explore fulfilling roles as a teacher educator by using a narrative analysis tool that teases apart the author's role of narrator, actor, and character. In the second fragment, we consider the contexts that influence a teacher educator researcher by examining the fragment to determine the levels of narrative. In the third fragment, we utilize the tools of plotlines and tensions to unpack the competing plotlines of epistemology (modernist vs. narrative) ending with an examination of the importance of ontology in narrative work. In our fourth fragment, we unpack nine approaches to narrative by examining the essential role of story for each element of the research process.

Research implications – As teacher educator researchers, we always stand in the midst – in the midst of the story where we may be simultaneously narrator, character, and actor, in the midst of living the research we are most interested in studying. Within a single moment, we can act as teacher, teacher educator, and teacher educator researcher when our research focuses on our own practice. Our experience as we live it represents the tension between arrival and arriving.

Value – The value of this chapter is the way in which it demonstrates narrative analysis and distinguishes among various approaches to narrative research.

The paper discusses some of the central features of IMP and industrial network research. Different types of empirical phenomena that are in focus of this research are presented. The paper also comments on epistemology, acknowledging some of the underpinnings of industrial network research and how they affect the use of case studies. Examples of case or narrative methodology are provided, taking a starting point in a set of chosen doctoral theses. In addition, a condensed version of the author’s own experiences from a case research and case-writing process covering a period of more than five years is provided (Andersson, 1996a, b). Literature support is brought in for the fact that case writing and the creation of narratives is often a long and ambiguous process of finding a final plot which merges the theoretical with the empirical. The conclusions and comments summarize some of the main implications and ideas emerging from the text, and points also to some emerging discussions in social science on the importance and status of narrative knowledge.

This research was conducted to outline the capturing and analysis of composite texts. We contextualize this using selfies as image and textual data sourced from Instagram and analyzed using a three stage analysis approach from a genre perspective.

The capturing of composite texts is outlined for numerous services available to researchers to study social media contexts. The analysis applies a three-stage technique of (1) what is shown, (2) what is said, and (3) what is the central narrative to overcome interpretive limitations of privileging text over image or vice versa.

Based on their structural characteristics, seven genre types emerged from the coded sample set.

Issues arise in capturing this data as social media platforms change their access and usage policies and as capturing services alter their capabilities.

The paper outlines a novel approach to capturing and understanding the mimesis and diegesis of selfies as composite texts.

This paper introduces two methodological innovations for qualitative research. We apply these innovations to holistically understand youth peer cultures and improve participant-driven qualitative methodology.

It moves the methodological frontier forward by blending technology with the “go-along” approach used by ethnographers to prioritize participants’ perspectives and experiences within their socio-cultural contexts.

We introduce the youth-centered and participant-driven virtual tours, including a neighborhood tour using Google Maps designed to explore how youth navigate their socio-spatial environments (n = 64; 10–17 year-olds; 2013) and a social media tour designed to explore how youth navigate their networked publics (n = 50; 10–17 year-olds; 2013), both in relation to their local peer cultures.

Applicable to a wide range of research populations, the Google Maps tour and the social media tour give the qualitative researcher additional tools to conduct participant-driven research into youths’ socio-cultural worlds. These two innovations help to address challenges in youth research as well as qualitative research more broadly. We find, for example, that the “go-along” aspect of the virtual tour minimizes the perceived threat of the researcher’s adult status and brings youth participants’ perspectives and experiences to the center of inquiry in the study of local peer cultures.

This chapter highlights the value offered by photographic research methods to the study of organizational compassion. We demonstrate this potential by first briefly reviewing the history and usage of photographic research methods in the social sciences and the state of compassion research. We then describe how compassion emerged as a key theme in a field study that utilized photographic methods. From this, we identify four approaches that photographic research methods can be used to extend our understanding of compassion in organizations. Specifically, we clarify how this stream of research can be enhanced by the inclusion of photographic methods. We highlight critical research decisions and possible concerns in implementing photographic methods. The chapter concludes with additional organizational phenomena that would benefit from using a photographic methods approach.

The various methods gathered under the umbrella label of qualitative (Guba & Lincoln, 1994), defined as the study of “things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005, p. 3), offer many benefits through their ability to access, explore, and experience real organizational people and problems in rich detail (Van Maanen, 1979). As an example, photographic research methods—primarily qualitative methods through which researchers use photographs to elicit information during interviews and focus groups—often result in deep and nuanced data (Collier & Collier, 1986; Harper, 2005; Vince & Warren, 2012). Photographic methodologies are well-suited to the exploration of new phenomena because they allow researchers to get close to the lived experience and organizational processes (Dion, 2007), attend simultaneously to the social and material world in organizations (Shortt & Warren, 2012), and offer the potential to “mine deeper shafts into a different part of human consciousness than do words-alone interviews” (Harper, 2002, p. 23). Organizational research has traditionally been dominated by a positivistic paradigm that focuses on theory evaluation through the use of quantitative methodologies (Lin, 1998; Sutton, 1997), whereas qualitative research offers the potential to build theory by illuminating underlying processes and causal mechanisms in specific contexts (Lee, 1999). Researchers developing theory may be particularly interested in the richness of the data gathered with qualitative methods (Edmondson & McManus, 2007) such as photographic methods. Qualitative research is thus well-matched to nascent literatures that require inductive study about a phenomenon to generate foundational knowledge (Edmondson & McManus, 2007).

One such nascent research stream that could benefit from photographic methodologies is organizational compassion (Rynes, Bartunek, Dutton, & Margolis, 2012). In its current state, compassion research within the organizational literature has generated many narratives of experiences of compassion in response to a specific tragedy (Dutton, Worline, Frost, & Lilius, 2006), as an organizational capability (Lilius et al., 2011b), or as an organizational capacity that an organization can develop (Madden, Duchon, Madden, & Plowman, 2012). These stories demonstrate that the common elements of the compassion process are the noticing of someone else's pain, empathizing with that person, and then responding in a way designed to lessen that pain (Kanov et al., 2004); however, because this process is so individualized, photographic methodologies offer researchers a chance to capture valuable new information about this process and the experience of compassion within organizations. In this chapter, we describe many potential benefits of designing organizational compassion research based on photographic methodologies.

In doing so, we offer several contributions. First, we show how photographic methodologies can create deeper responses during interviews and observations that may lead to surprising insights for theory. Second, by suggesting some of the insights that have been generated about compassion through photographic methodologies, we offer novel research ideas for this growing body of literature. The following sections provide background on the development and history of photographic methodologies and review the studies and methodologies that have contributed to our understanding of compassion within organizations. Subsequently, we describe some of the ways in which compassion has surfaced during our own field study using photograph elicitation. Finally, we describe possible studies that could benefit from the use of four forms of photographic methodologies to explore more targeted research questions related to organizational compassion and also offer a range of other organizational phenomena that could benefit from a photographic methods approach.

Purpose – In this chapter, we examine the influence of the commonplace of sociality within narrative inquiry during the process of interpretation and meaning-making. Our project was multivisioned because we were interested in what we learned about the methodology of narrative inquiry within the context of a phenomenon for inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000), which for this study was our identity as teacher educators (Bullough, 2005).

Approach – Using narrative inquiry, we interrogate our interpretive processes privileging the commonplace of sociality in examining stories of our identity as teacher educators from our own experience as teacher educators.

Findings – In our inquiry into interpretation from the orientation of the narrative commonplace of the social, four points of understanding emerged: (1) interpretation within the methodology of narrative inquiry is living and interpretation exists in the midst; (2) all three dimensions of the narrative inquiry space are always part of the process regardless of the commonplace under consideration; (3) if we look inward/outward in the process of interpretation, it always leads us back to the relational; and (4) when we deepen the analytic process, ethical issues, and therefore renewed grappling with our identity, emerge.

Research implications – Narrative inquiry at every phase – design, data collection, analysis, and representation – is a form of living and analysis and interpretation. As well, representation must allow space for the holistic and organic quality that this form of inquiry demands in the development and communication of ideas.

Value – The study points to the ways in which research on humans’ action and interaction returns to the relational and ethical even when that is not the focus of the research. Further, our response to narrative inquiry is not always analysis but often turns to story instead.

This chapter examines how hospitality and tourism researchers can use ‘expressive text’ (or writing) to express the lived quality of an experience in order to ‘show what an experience is really like’ rather than ‘tell what it is like’. Expressive text refers to written language forms such as narrative, poetry and metaphor that can be used as tools in research to vividly represent the meaning and feeling conveyed in an experience. The expressive text-based approach to researching lived experience provides a textual link between experience and its expression. For this reason, it is especially useful when working with lived experience accounts of phenomenological and hermeneutic research.

The expressive text-based approach suggested here is still a relatively under explored arena within hospitality and tourism research. As a relatively under explored arena, the rich insightful knowledge that can be gained from understanding practitioner experience is rarely a central focus of scholarly writings about the workplace in hospitality and tourism contexts. However, in order to be fully appreciated as a discipline in its own right and to advance knowledge of the field, understanding the typical and significant attributes of hospitality and tourism work will be decidedly helpful.

One of the difficulties of working with lived experience accounts is finding a suitable research approach that helps to both retain the lived elements of the experience and ensure the rigour of the inquiry. An expressive text-based methodological framework that has a phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophical underpinning is argued to be suitable for this purpose. Therefore, the focus of this study is to discuss such a methodology and explain the reasons for its content, style and structure in researching lived experience. The approach that is proposed here consists of a five-tiered textually expressive methodology that is employed to contextualise, portray and interpret the lived experience meanings in order to understand the significance of the experience in relation to relevant discourses in hospitality and tourism studies, and to consider implications for policy and professional practice. The guiding questions of the five-tiered framework cover the following issues: (1) What is the context of the lived experience? (2) What is the lived experience of this practice like? (3) What is the meaning of this experience for the practitioner? (4) What is the significance of the experience in contributing to the advancement of knowledge within the field? (5) What are the implications for practice and professional development?

To illustrate uses of this methodology in research, the study here includes an example showing portrayals and interpretations of the typical and significant lived nature of hospitality reception work. This shows and communicates the full meaning of the episode, circumstances or situation. The chapter then concludes with some reflections on benefits as well as tensions in working within an expressive text-based phenomenological and hermeneutic framework.