| This work establishes that all levels of qualitative research accounts reflect storytelling elements, whether it be the description of methodologies or the presentation of research participants' responses. Once this point is substantiated, the work points out the slippery ground between fiction and nonfiction upon which qualitative researchers must tread. Further, because of this fiction-nonfiction dilemma, conventional discussions of credibility and validity do not apply. If anything, these conventions inhibit the potential of qualitative research accounts and work to establish inequitable power relations between the researcher and her participants, undercutting liberatory goals. While overtly many qualitative researchers reject the use of the terms---credibility and validity---unwittingly, in the very forms of presentations we choose, we privilege these terms. As an answer to evaluating qualitative researcher accounts (stories) in ways that avoid these quantitative notions, this project explores the usefulness of feminist narratology---an evaluative tool that takes into account the elements of narrative while maintaining awareness of race, class, gender, and sexual preference. To explicate this point, the work brings to bear feminist narratology on groundbreaking qualitative research accounts, viewing texts as cultural artifacts that demonstrate how academic culture maintains positivist notions of knowledge and power even as it claims postmodern perspectives. |
