Why work with stories?

These are answers to some questions I commonly get asked about this approach.

Isn't this the same as surveys and questionnaires?

There is a phenomenon I like to call "the power of stories", which is that people act differently and expect different things when they tell stories than when they talk normally. There is a ton of literature on the differences between storytelling and other conversation, which anybody can look up. Some of the things I've personally noticed about people and stories are:

1. Telling a story is by nature a more personal, animated and emotional response than providing a factual answer because it taps into a different set of instinctual behavior patterns. Because of this, people often reveal things about their feelings or opinions on a subject while they are telling a story that they wouldn't have been willing or able to reveal when asked a direct question about the topic.
2. People tend to have stronger reactions to hearing stories, in terms of the emotions they show, than they have to hearing factual information. For example, listeners tend to fidget less and lean in more when a story is being told than when someone is giving opinions or relating information. This makes asking people to interpret stories (i.e., answer questions about them) a good way to surface their feelings about important issues.
3. A story has a natural situation-tension-resolution shape, and people usually tend to find it difficult to "leave" the story before the resolution has occurred, whether they are telling it or listening to it - it pulls them in and contains them until it has completed its course.

The most important of these observations is the first one: asking people to tell stories gets different, and usually more "telling", results than asking people to respond to simple direct questions. If the kind of thing you need to know, or you need other people to know, has to do with beliefs and opinions and feelings, asking people to tell you stories can provide a more authentic result than asking them direct questions.

For example, compare these two questions:

1. Do you think your local government is doing a (a) terrible, (b) okay, (c) good enough, or (d) excellent job meeting your needs?
2. What was the last interaction you had with your local government? Can you tell us what happened? (After the story is told) How do you feel about that story? What do you think it says about your local government?

Obviously the second approach is going to get you richer information if you want to answer the question "how do people feel about the performance of their local government?". Note that this approach does involve some instances of question asking, but the questions asked are about the stories people have told, not directly about the topic of interest. That distance creates a degree of safety which allows people to tell you things they would not otherwise be able to tell you.

Having said that, any information you can find about designing and writing good surveys and survey questions (of which there is a lot on the web) should be useful to you. There are all sorts of free survey tools on the web and lots of information available on how to use them, all of which apply here.

But aren't stories just "anecdotal evidence"?

Yes they are, but it depends on what you are doing with them. For example, say you asked people to tell stories about a giant software company whose name starts with M. You might get some pretty strange stories, like that they are in charge of governments, or that they eat children, or whatever. Of course it would be ridiculous to believe any of those stories, which is what the term "anecdotal evidence" refers to: believing told stories to be objectively true. The point of a story project is not to take told stories as any sort of objective truth, but to take them as indicators of the feelings, beliefs and opinions of those who told the stories. In fact, asking groups of people you expect to have opposing opinions the same story-eliciting questions is a wonderful way to conduct a story project, because you can see all of the different truths arrayed in front of you and survey the landscape of belief.

When you ask different people the same questions (for and about their stories) you can apply quantitative methods to the data produced to create the kinds of scientific, non-anecdotal evidence you need to draw statistical conclusions. For example, you might find that 80% of people who told stories they labeled as "strongly negative" about the giant software company also reported having purchased products from that company in the last year.

Does anybody really tell the truth in these things?

That depends on what you mean by "truth". One of the things I learned on starting to work with stories is that there are many types of truth. There is objective truth, which is probably what you mean by your question, but there are also other truths: emotional truths, like "I feel sad about this" (even if the thing they feel sad about isn't strictly speaking true); cultural truths, like those that come up when urban legends surface; group truths, like those that everybody in the group knows but rarely shares with outsiders, religious truths, mythological truths, personal truths, and on and on. When you do a story project, unlike a scientific experiment, you are not very interested in finding or passing on objective truths. The other kinds are more important, and stories are exceptionally wonderful vehicles for transmitting non-objective truths.

Why does it matter if the stories are "raw"?

Let me tell you a story. One story project I did was for a company that wanted to think about how its customers perceived one of its products. They collected some stories from customers about the product, and some of the stories contained some pretty strange rumors about what you could do with the product and what it could do to you, most of them wrong. (You know, X brand of soap can kill your cat, that sort of thing.) The stories were to be given out to company staff so that they could better understand the customer's point of view and help dispel some of the rumors. One of the people on the project wanted to edit the stories to remove all "errors" and replace what people said with "facts." I managed to talk the person out of doing that, but only by agreeing that they could place a "fact" addendum after each story denouncing what the customer said and setting things straight. The person did this, but the "fact addendum" worked against the goals of the project, since it was obvious to everyone that the point of the project was not to establish the facts (which the staff members knew already) but to help people understand the way customers thought.

In my experience, if there are any alterations to the actual words spoken, for any reason, the story project is pretty much ruined. There are times when you need to keep some stories away from the larger group because they are particularly inflammatory or erroneous or malicious, and you may need to remove identifying details, but you should never disguise or alter the meaningful content of the stories.

Is this the same as qualitative research?

Many projects in the fields related to qualitative research (narrative inquiry, narrative research, ethnography, focus groups, and so on) have a central problem: they involve researchers collecting stories which they interpret, thereby inserting their own biases into the project. It's true that researchers are supposed to be trained in such a way that they avoid inserting biases, but running a focus group or observing a group without seeing what you want to see is a fine art which (in my opinion) few can really practice. The approach I describe in this book removes expert interpretation and instead relies on considering many instances of interpretation by the storytellers and by others in the community or communities of interest. When you run a story project using this approach, you never interpret a single story. What you do is look at patterns in the interpretations of stories by others: those whose voices you want to hear or convey.

This is just the kind of marketing stuff used for selling candy, isn't it? It's not for serious work.

Actually it's been used for some pretty serious stuff, life and death issues on large scales. In fact, using narrative methods is one of the best ways to get into spaces where it is difficult to get answers to questions because people are unwilling or unable to provide answers in any other way.

You are just preying on people and finding out their secrets, aren't you? What about privacy?

What to do about privacy is one of the major decisions involved in setting up and running a story project, as it is with any project in which people disclose information about themselves. Whether privacy is a strong issue depends on the group of people you will be asking to tell stories, the nature of the stories you will be asking them to tell, the purpose of the project, and what you intend to do with the stories.

Why don't you talk about methods for telling stories, to motivate and persuade people?

There is a fairly large industry centered around telling people prepared stories in order to motivate, persuade, educate, inform, and inspire them. Certainly that sort of thing has its place in the world, and you can find lots of information about it on the web and in books, but ... I find it narrow and, honestly, not very interesting. I'm much more excited about what can happen when you listen to people and connect people, because I think it is many times more powerful than simply trying to influence them.