Representation and the Text: Re-Framing the Narrative Voice

Focuses on authorial representations of contested reality in qualitative research.This book focuses on representations of contested realities in qualitative research. The authors examine two separate, but interrelated, issues: criticisms of how researchers use "voice," and suggestions about how to develop experimental voices that expand the range of narrative strategies.

Changing relationships between researchers and respondents dictate alterations in textual representations--from the "view from nowhere" to the view from a particular location, and from the omniscient voice to the polyvocality of communities of individuals. Examples of new representations and textual experiments provide models for how some authors have struggled with voice in their texts, and in so doing, broaden who they and we mean by "us."

William G. Tierney is Professor and Director of the Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis at the University of Southern California. Yvonna S. Lincoln is Professor and Head of the Educational Administration Department at Texas A&M University.