Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: I am grateful to Carol Thomas for devoting such careful attention to my work, and for the even-handed treatment that characterises the entire paper. Indeed, given that I appreciate debate and even controversy when it comes to such methodological issues, I could have wished that the discussion might have been a little more pungent. In some ways I have rather little to add: the paper does justice to my original arguments, and I have myself expanded on my general position in various papers (cited in Thomas’s discussion). On the other hand, given the opportunity to do so, I should like to make some general points in order to clarify my original position and my current commitments. Ironically, the day that I was offered the opportunity to write this response I was completing my revisions to a paper for Sociological Research Online that re-visits my comments on illness narratives (Atkinson 2009). Readers will see, if they care to follow it up, that there I have modified some of my earliest strictures, notably concerning Mishler (with whom I have remained on cordial terms for over 25 years). I am happy to have prompted a number of debates about method. It seems to me that there is little point in writing about research methods and discussing research methods with students and colleagues unless there is an element of debate surrounding them. If one thing is clear, it is surely that the proper conduct of social science is contested in many ways. Nobody should claim to have all the answers, and there are certainly no formulae that guarantee the outcomes of inquiry. But I remain firmly committed to the general idea that it is the purpose of sociology and anthropology to conduct research in a systematic, purposeful way, and to analyse data with equal care. As a matter of fact, I am not especially excited by abstruse epistemological or theoretical disputes. I am committed to research that is methodical, and to the production of ideas that are based on an appraisal of evidence. Clearly there are different ways of achieving those aims, but I do not think that it is worth abandoning them. Consequently, my comments on narratives and narrative analysis were always intended to exemplify a much more general set of methodological issues, and I have continued – with colleagues at Cardiff – to pursue them (e.g. Atkinson, Coffey and Delamont 2003, Atkinson, Delamont and Housley 2008). Thomas refers to my preferred approach as ‘scientific’, and although I would not necessarily choose that precise term, I am content to accept the spirit that it conveys, as I outline once more below. In a nutshell, all of my methodological commentary has been aimed at one overriding goal. That is, to encourage researchers in the social sciences to collect and analyse data in a methodical way. Nothing more. When it comes to the collection and analysis of narratives – whether they occur ‘naturally’ or are generated in the course of research interviews – then I believe that we should approach them as we ought to approach any other social action. There needs be nothing special about narratives. I remain bemused by researchers who act as if stories, accounts and other kinds of narratives somehow constituted special kinds of data. I personally see no reason to endow narratives with any qualities different from any other spoken or unspoken activity. I therefore remain opposed in principle to what might be called narrative exceptionalism, preferring to see any and every form of action given equally rigorous scrutiny by social scientists. I do not, therefore, think that –pace several influential commentators – narrative is an especially distinctive form of human or social behaviour. I also remain opposed to various forms of reductionism. Too often ‘narrative’ is a way of investing the individual speaking subject with a significance that is profoundly un-sociological. Let me make myself doubly clear. My argument is not one levelled against narrative per se. I cannot indeed imagine how one could be ‘for’ or ‘against’ narrative, or any other form of social action. My argument is, however, strongly in favour of treating narrative like any and every form of activity, and therefore to analyse narratives in precisely the same way that one might address any other. I am by no means alone in promoting this view, of course, and these issues of method are by no means confined to the treatment of illness narratives. They represent but a special case of the widespread tendency to treat any and all ‘narratives’ as special, and to reproduce them appreciatively rather than analyse them formally (cf.Atkinson and Delamont 2006). This in turn reflects more problematic tendencies in ‘qualitative research’– but that is a debate that must continue elsewhere.
Source: Sociology of Health & Illness
Author: Paul Atkinson
Institution: Cardiff University
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2162798880